[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5. (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Apr 21 12:43:33 CEST 2006

On 4/21/06, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:

Paul Moore wrote: > 2. Distributors will supply .egg files rather than bdistwininst > installers (this is already happening).

Really people should at least be uploading source packages in addition to eggs; it's certainly not hard to do so.

Windows user perspective: So what? If there's a C extension involved, I can't build it on at least one machine I use (so I build elsewhere and move the installer over). If external libraries are involved, I quite likely don't have .lib files, headers, etc available.

I know this isn't such an issue on Unix. But the rise of bdist_wininst installers on Windows was a HUGE benefit. I remember the nightmares I used to have finding binaries for things I couldn't build myself (and I'm atypical - I have lots of tools that most people don't).

Nowadays, there are more and more packages I can't find bdist_wininst installers for, again. (Turbogears and PyProtocols are the two I recall offhand). I can find eggs, but to use them I lose the package management I like. Please don't tell me that Windows' Add/Remove Programs is limited or incomplete - it does exactly what I want, and I have no need to change. And I don't want a mix - I want everything under my Python install directory to be managed by an Add/Remove Programs entry.

I'm quite happy to convert eggs to bdist_wininst installers (or MSI installers) by hand. That's a mechanical task, in theory, and as I'm catering for my preferences, I see no reason to expect someone else to do that for me. But I can't build from scratch, so don't force me to.

Perhaps a distributor quick intro needs to be written for the standard library. Something short; both distutils and setuptools documentation are pretty long, and for someone who just has some simple Python code to get out it's overwhelming.

Agreed. Maybe I'll knock up a simple set of setup.py templates (for a pure-python module, a simple package, and a C extension, maybe) and put them on the Wiki. I'll add it to my TODO list.

Paul.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list