Installation tends to have problems when there are old installations present, especially when a different user is doing the new installation.

In particular, it appears that the chmod() done in 'copy_file()' (as a result of the "install" command attempting to preserve the mode of files from the build tree) fails, because you can't chmod() a file owned by somebody else.

Paul Dubois suggests that simply unlinking the target file before doing the copy should work.  I think he's right, but need to think about it and test it a bit first.

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I think unlinking first is the right thing to do, having 
just run into another problem that seems to be caused by 
this.  Installing *.so files to an NFS partition messed up 
other  people, I think because they had the *.so file 
loaded into memory and the kernel's VM got confused.  
(That's the theory, anyway.)

Bumping up the priority as a reminder to myself...

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I'll have a look at this, as I've already assigned some
installation related bugs to myself.

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This bit David Binger today, so I finally dug in and fixed 
it.  Patch attached for a sanity-check.
(2.2 bugfix candidate)

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Um, may be being dense, but os.unlink raises os.error if you
try to unlink a file that doesn't exist... so won't this
blow up in a first-time install for instance?

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Oops!  Shows I only tried it with a repeated install...  New
patch uploaded,  which only unlinks if os.path.exists(dst).

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That looks better.  Check it in?

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Checked in as rev. 1.12 of file_util.py.