[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?

[Thomas Wouters]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 01:51:03PM +1300, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Thomas Wouters wrote:

> > Actually, that's where distutils and bdist_* comes in. Mr. Random Developer
> > writes a regular distutils setup.py, and I can install the latest,
> > not-quite-in-apt version by doing 'setup.py bdist_deb' and installing the
> > resulting .deb.

> Why not just do 'setup.py install' directly?

Because that *does* overwrite files the package system might not want
overwritten, and the resulting install is not listed in the packaging
system, not taken into account on upgrades, etc. I don't want to keep track
of a separate list of distutils-installed packages; that's what I use APT
for. If I wanted to keep manually massaging my system after each install or
upgrade, I'd be using Gentoo or FreeBSD ;)

(I should point out that CPAN and CPANPLUS on FreeBSD do this slightly
better; they register packages installed through CPAN (or actually the
build/install part of it, MakefileMaker or whatever it's called) with the
FreeBSD packaging database. I don't know what distutils does on FreeBSD, but
that packaging database is just a bunch of files in appropriately named
directories in /var/db/pkg...)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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