[Distutils] Installing large applications

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 15, 2004, at 2:36 PM, Tim Peters wrote:

> [Fred L. Drake, Jr.]
> ...
>> Distutils should not allow the installaion to use an existing 
>> directory
>> without an explicit override from the user (--force?).
>>
>> The Windows installer will be modified to allow alternate installation
>> directories to be supported,
>
> The plural "directories" confuses this for me.  It reads as if a 
> single run
> of "install.py --application" may actually specify multiple 
> installation
> directories.  Or is it that the Windows installer will be modified to 
> allow
> *an* (singular) alternate installation directory?
>
>> and provide the same behavior for applications by default.
>
> I'm not sure how much this proposal is intended to address.  An 
> application
> like Zope expects some of its components (like ZODB) to show up on 
> sys.path,
> without any runtime code of its own fiddling sys.path to make that 
> happen.
> The only ways to do that on Windows are to install such components 
> under the
> Python installation's Lib/site-packages/, or to add registry keys.  
> Neither
> way allows two distinct versions of ZODB to be used with a single 
> Python
> installation.
>
> I think you were intending to address this, because of the earlier:
>
>> One interesting aspect for such applications is that it is often
>> desirable to install multiple versions of the application on a single
>> system.
>
> There's only one Lib/site-packages/ per Python installation on 
> Windows, and
> it's inside the Python tree (*all* of Python is in "the Python tree" on
> Windows -- binaries, libraries, docs, test suite, tools, everything).

What about pth files?  I use them all the time for adding additional 
site directories.  Try making a pth file with something like this in it 
and dropping it into the system site-packages:

import site, os; site.addsitedir(os.path.expanduser(os.path.join("~", 
"YourApplication", "site-packages")))

-bob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2357 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20040615/1b84c643/smime.bin