February 25, 2025

Install Watson from source on GNU/Linux

On GNU/Linux Trisquel, the package td-watson isn’t the latest version; this older version breaks.

One of the maintainers suggested I install the package using pip but there is no pip on Trisquel.¹

I documented my own installation from source below.

How to install Watson from source?

Download the source code

Download the latest .tar.gz file from https://pypi.org/project/td-watson/#td-watson-2.1.0.tar.gz

I download programmes I install from source in ~/bin/.

Extract the files:

$ tar -xvzf td-watson-2.1.0.tar.gz

Install dependencies

Check dependencies:

$ less requirements.txt

You should see something like this:

arrow>=1.0.0
click>=8.0
click-didyoumean
colorama; sys_platform == "win32"
requests

The name of the packages are:

python3-arrow
python3-click
python3-click-didyoumean
python3-colorama
python3-requests

Install those packages:

$ sudo apt install python3-didyoumean python3-colorama python3-arrow python3-click python3-requests

All the dependencies should be installed; you can check with $ apt list .

Create package and install Watson with checkinstall

Now we will use the programme checkinstall to install from source.

checkinstall creates a debian package from the source file, so that if you want to remove all the files, all you have to do is remove the package.

If you don’t have checkinstall:

$ sudo apt install checkinstall

To install with checkinstall, run:

$ sudo checkinstall make install

I wasn’t sure whether I should install as sudo so I tried without first, but permission to a file was denied.

Troubleshooting - missing dependencies?

I got one more error message.

The solution was to install this package

$ sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools

Checkinstall will tell you if the install ran succesuflly.

Check that watson is installed

watson help

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1. Because the repository PyPI includes proprietary software; source: Trisquel’s forum: https://trisquel.info/en/search/node/pip%20proprietary and Trisquel’s repository: https://trisquel.info/it/issues/3741↩︎

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