[Python-Dev] Killing off bdist_dumb (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
13 Nov 2002 23:14:53 +0100

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

Aren't zipfiles used as el-cheapo installers on Windows? I've seen plenty of stuff that was distributed as a simple zipfile, with instructions "unpack ".

Sure, but on Windows, you have bdist_wininst, which isn't any more difficult to use, and far superior. People building distutils packages for Windows appreciate the fancy-without-efforts installer (I'm one of those people myself); I would never consider using bdist_dumb on Windows.

In fact, I thought it was meant for systems like Solaris, where the native packaging is not supported. Of course, on Solaris, I would expect to get a .tar.gz, not a .zip.

So even though I do use binutils binary packages, I would not suffer from losing bdist_dumb, and I can't imagine anybody who would.

Regards, Martin