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On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

As regards the format, bdist\_dumb is about the right level - but
having just checked it has some problems (which if I recall, have been
known for some time, and are why bdist\_dumb doesn't get used).
Specifically, bdist\_dumb puts the location of site-packages ON THE
BUILD SYSTEM into the archive, making it useless for direct unzipping
on a target system which has Python installed somewhere else.

I don't know about the case for packaging/distutils2, but I know that in original distutils, you can work around this by making bdist\_dumb call the install commands with different arguments. �That is, it's a relatively shallow flaw in bdist\_dumb.

bdist\_wininst, for example, is basically a zipped bdist\_dumb with altered install arguments and an .exe header tacked on the front. �(Along with a little extra data crammed in between the two.)