pyx-0.10 experimental package

PyX is a Python package for the creation of PostScript and PDF files. It seems like a more modern alternative to MetaPost so I was keen to try it out. I found that the experimental pyx-0.8.1 package in Sage 2.10 did not work (errors about a DVI file not finishing) so I created a Sage source package of the latest version: pyx-0.10.spkg.

Download that package and then do sage -i pyx-0.10.skpg to install it.

Here is the standard Hello World example (look for hello.pdf in your working directory):

import pyx

x = y = int(0)

c = pyx.canvas.canvas()  
c.text(x, y, "Hello, world!")  
c.stroke(pyx.path.line(x, y, x+5, y+0))  
c.writePDFfile("hello")

The previous pyx spkg tried to put the pyxrc file into /etc but I prefer to run Sage as a normal user, and sudo-ing to install a package isn’t completely straightforward (you have to set some environment variables, so it’s not newbie-friendly). I made my spkg-install file put pyxrc into $SAGE_LOCAL/etc but I’m not sure if this is a suitable location. Any suggestions?

edit: On the sage-devel mailing list I was told to use ~/.sage so I have ammended the pyx-0.10 package to do this.