No I never found that info.

I got it installed finally. Debian is a bit different, requires a "sudoers" file in addition to the sudo group. Once I got that I did the install from my normal users account but using sudo and it installed OK, replacing the launcher's 1.9.8 with 2.5.3. Didn't have any issues sending after that.

The python install/setup script apparently has enough smarts to do things that require root as well as the things that don't and does the right thing for both. That's why it didn't fully work trying to install using the root account but does with sudo (path differences etc). Of course the install totally fails with just a normal user account without sudo.