At last, SNAKES is listed in the Python Package Index on this page. The nice consequence is that SNAKES is now installable by simply running pip install SNAKES. I'll try to maintain here an up-to-date version, which should be easy because this is almost automated.

So there are now four ways to install SNAKES, with various pros and cons:

• pip install SNAKES to get a very recent version but which requires manual updates (pip install --upgrade SNAKES)
• hg clone https://Franck.Pommereau@code.google.com/p/python-snakes/ then python setup.py install to get a possibly even more recent version, but which also requires manual updates
• install Ubuntu package to get a version that is not enough often updated (because it requires some work from me and takes some time), but which provides you with automatic updates
• get code from the Google code download page and run python setup.py install, but this is probably the worst solution because code will be outdated (this requires even more work from me and takes even more time) and it requires manual updates also

I'm not sure there is a perfect way to distribute a software that continuously evolves, small changes after small changes. If it takes more time to make it available than to implement a change, I usually just do the change and pull the code to Google code repository. I'll try now on to also upload to PyPI because it is really a question of running one command.

By the way, I'm really ashamed that I did not put SNAKES on PyPI sooner, I was afraid of the potential complexity of the process (like publishing on LaunchPad that is really not as straightforward as it should be). But now I've RTFM and actually ran the three required commands, I must admit it's the most simple process I could imagine.