[Distutils] install --dry-run broken?

[P.J. Eby]

At 02:54 PM 4/22/2010 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>I tried the distutils example:
>
>   http://docs.python.org/distutils/introduction.html#a-simple-example
>
>running
>
>   python2.6 setup.py install --dry-run
>
>(or python2.6 setup.py install -n)
>
>installed the package.
>
>Am I missunderstanding something? Or is --dry-run an april fool's
>joke? :)

It appears the issue is that this has always been broken in 
distutils.  What you need to do is:

    python2.6 setup.py --dry-run install

(Or -n).

The problem is that the 'install' command doesn't pass on its local 
--dry-run flag to any of the subcommands that do the real work.

Probably, the --dry-run option should be dropped from the individual 
commands altogether in distutils2, with only a global flag being allowed.