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

A.M.Kuchling A.M.Kuchling
Wed, 13 Nov 2002 20:15:03 -0500

On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 05:24 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Why do you want to lose bdistdumb?

Bug #410541 is that the .zip archive created by bdist_dumb is useless because it contains filenames relative to the root directory. Because Python can be installed anywhere on Windows, the .zip files are therefore useless for Windows installation. They might be usable on Unix platforms, as long as you're sure about whether Python is in /usr/ or /usr/local, and if tying it to a single version is OK (because the path will be /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages).

This could be fixed by making it possible to use relative paths, of course, so you'd have to unpack the resulting .zip in site-packages, but if no one uses .zip files for this purpose, why bother?

If bdist_wininst wasn't around, then bdist_dumb would be the only way to install on Windows, and clearly this would have to fixed. With bdist_wininst, I don't know if anyone cares. On Unix bdist_dumb also doesn't handle scripts, apparently.

Andrew MacIntyre's use of .zip files on OS/2 may save bdist_dumb, though. Andrew, was the use of full paths the problem that kept you from using it?

The options are:

  1. leave it as-is, broken and useless. (The current state; this seems pointless.)
  2. fix it
  3. rip it out

--amk