[Pythonmac-SIG] bdist_mpkg questions

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 3, 2005, at 11:24 PM, Nick Matsakis wrote:

>
> I'm playing around with bdist_mpkg and have some questions.  If  
> these get
> answered, I promise to put them on the wiki:
>
> 1. Why does it build a meta-package with a single package inside?   
> Why not
> just a package?

Each distutils target is a separate pkg.  Anyway, it's an  
implementation detail, you shouldn't need to care, it doesn't really  
make a difference for anything except the receipt(s).

> 2. When I install a bdist-made package, the files have the owner of  
> the
> user that built the package not the user installing the package, even
> though no root authorization is required.  Apple's documentation  
> says "By
> default, if no authorization is required, the files that Installer  
> places
> on a user's computer are owned by the user doing the installation."  
> see:
>
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/ 
> SoftwareDistribution/Concepts/sd_permissions_author.html
>
> I strongly suspect this is a bug in Apple's installer; Under 10.3,  
> their
> documentation claimed that packages wouldn't change the permissions of
> existing directories, but this is exactly what happened with the  
> Appscript
> Installer 1.0 (10.4 appears to fix this).  Anyway, if we can't trust
> Installer.app to set the permissions appropriately, is there any  
> way to
> set the owner/permissions of the file at the time the package is built
> (other than su-ing to that user)?

bdist_mpkg always finds the deepest installation location to install  
to, so changing the permissions of existing directories won't  
happen.  Even if installer does have that bug, it shouldn't matter.

> 3. What's the deal with PackageManager?  What is a "repository",  
> exactly,
> and what format are the packages in a repository?

PackageManager is completely irrelevant.

> 4. I'm getting a very bizarre error trying to run bdist_mpkg.  If I  
> run
> the script directly, it can't find the bdist package.  However, if  
> I run
> it as an argument to python2.3, it does.  I'm willing to ignore  
> this, but
> if anyone has suggestions I'd love to hear them (this is with the  
> built-in
> python on 10.3.9.  Observe:
>
> artoo% cat /usr/local/bin/bdist_mpkg
> #!/usr/bin/python2.3
> from bdist_mpkg.scripts.script_bdist_mpkg import main
> main()
>
> artoo% bdist_mpkg -h
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/local/bin/bdist_mpkg", line 2, in ?
>     from bdist_mpkg.scripts.script_bdist_mpkg import main
> ImportError: No module named bdist_mpkg.scripts.script_bdist_mpkg

Did you have some old installation of py2app or PyObjC?  It was  
organized differently many versions ago and can cause stuff like  
this.  Clean out any of /Library/Python/2.3 that is also in /Library/ 
Python/2.3/py2app (i.e. bdist_mpkg, macholib, etc.).  You might as  
well rip out the py2app folder in there too and reinstall, just in case.

-bob