Mailman 3 February 2005 - Distutils-SIG

(no subject)
by Natalie Harris 14 Feb '05

14 Feb '05

Did you ever locate this file? I am looking for it too Hello, I am trying my bscw 4.2 users to be authenticated through an ldap server. I have installed python 2.3.4 and python-ldap-2.0.0pre14.win32-py2.3.exe. I can' t find ldapmodule.so in order to install it. Could you help me please ? With regards, Nick

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feeback on the distutils documentation
by Michele Simionato 03 Feb '05

03 Feb '05

Hi Greg, I am reading the distutils documentation and I would like to give some feedback. Generally speaking the documentation is pretty good but there two or three minor issues. First of all, the simple example described at http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/dist/simple-example.html is not that good: if I try to run it as it is, I get a few error messages, since some required metadata are missing. However to discover what are the required metadata, I have to go at http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/dist/meta-data.html, which, BTW, does not list all the metadata. To discover the full list I had to look at the source code, at the DistributionMetadata class. In particular, http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/dist/meta-data.html should list the platforms metadata, which is not required, but if you don't give it the PKG-INFO file will have an ugly "Platform: UNKNOWN" entry. I haven't yet finished the reading yet, so I could have additional feedback in a short while. BTW, I appreciate very much your work, including optparse and quixote and your documentation style ;) Keep the good work going, Michele P.S. the address in the example http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/dist/setup-script.html (gward(a)python.net) does NOT work!

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Distutils and Applications
by Fred L. Drake, Jr. 03 Feb '05

03 Feb '05

The distutils package has generally proven to be a quite useful tool to support building and installing Python modules and packages. There's some limited support for installing scripts and data files, which makes it somewhat useful for larger applications. Large applications can have complex requirements for installation, however, and distutils has some limitations that could be addressed. Larger applications generally want a number of features that aren't currently supported by distutils: - They want to be isolated from the rest of the platform, and not generally have their code installed into the site-packages/ directory. Normally they don't want to share the platform's Python installation, if there is one. - They may want to install 3rd-party packages into their isolated environment as well, in addition to their own implementation. It should be easy to take a package containing a 3rd-party package and bundle it with the application or to install it later. - It must be possible for scripts to behave in the ways that are expected on the host platform. This includes the presence/absence of filename extensions. - Particularly elaborate "platform" applications (such as Zope 3) may want to support multiple "extension" areas which can then be "bound" to different versions of the application software. - It should be possible to perform installation in a "silent" mode that does not requre interation with a human. This is especially important to support managed deployments. It should be possible to specify the installation location using a command line argument. - Conventional packaging structures for each platform should be used. For Unix, this means it should be able to create a tarball that supports configure/make/make install, and for Windows, either a conventional executable installer or an MSI installer (or both). (Remember, the consumers are not necessarily Python programmers.) Some of these may be best provided by extensions to distutils, and others may be best provided by separate utilities. I'd like to figure out what portion of this is shared and should be supported by distutils, and what should remain outside distutils. Anything of this that could be shared (in or out of distutils itself) we can work on at PyCon in the distutils sprint: http://www.python.org/moin/DistutilsSprint -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>

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Python Documentation in ThoutReader format
by Mark D. Carey 02 Feb '05

02 Feb '05

Dear Fred, Guido, and the rest of the Python Documentation Team, I am part of a small group of developers that distributes the ThoutReader, an open source documentation platform that allows developers to browse, search, bookmark, and append their open source documentation as well as favorite reference books, at the same time, in one format, even off line. The ThoutReader is a cross-platform application written in Java, licensed under GPL 2.0, and hosted on SourceForge. A large international web hosting company asked us to parse the Python Documentation into the ThoutReader format which they feel would be a huge benefit for their client sites. So far we have parsed into the ThoutReader format PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, BSD, and now Python. I would like to share with you the work that we have done and ensure it meets your approval before we post or distribute it on our website www.osoft.com. I believe we have included all of the required copyright, author, and license requirements but I seek your approval before proceeding. I posted the file www.osoft.com/python/Python-Documentation-2.4.jar to our server for you to download and review. The link to the latest version of the ThoutReader (required to read the file) is http://www.osoft.com or direct from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=101817&package_id=1258 90. The benefit of the ThoutReader is that it standardizes all of a developers documentation needs. Documentation comes in different formats and different locations, making information hard to find when, where and how you need it: this means a lot of inconvenience and frustration by developers. Not only could a developer search the Python documentation, but they could also search related books like Dive into Python by Mark Pilgrim or other such titles at the same time. Best of all, all of this is done offline! Our goal (with your approval) is to be listed as an alternative documentation source at http://docs.python.org/download.html. Whatever documentation is free, we provide for free. Authors may also contribute commercial content to be distributed via the ThoutReader. Authors retain ALL of their IP rights and set the selling price. OSoft does not make any money to support our project until the author makes money first. We believe that it is not fair for an author to write a reference book that sells for $49.00 and only make $1-2 per book royalty. I look forward to hearing back from you before I proceed. Thanks for giving us this opportunity. We are still tweaking our parsed content but it is certainly useable right now. Mark Mark D. Carey President OSoft, Inc. 253-284-0475 mcarey(a)osoft.com 2511 South Hood Street Tacoma, WA 98402

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