Mailman 3 June 2005 - Distutils-SIG

EasyInstall: scripts
by Ian Bicking 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

I'm wondering how scripts should be handled by easyinstall -- right now they pretty much get ignored. But I'm not sure how they should be handled at all. Distutils has a couple rules, with --install-scripts, and --home (which uses ~/bin), and the normal rules... and then some translation of those options to Windows. But none of those seems to translate very well to easyinstall. Or eggs. I don't have any ideas myself on this. Except that the scripts themselves are usually pretty dumb anyway, just thin wrappers that fix up sys.path, import a module, and call a function; so the status quo could probably be improved upon anyway. -- Ian Bicking / ianb(a)colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

4 10

EasyInstall: List of installed packages
by Paul Moore 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

Is there a way of asking EasyInstall "what packages are installed"? Without that, I can't see myself moving away from bdist_wininst. I know that a registry of installed packages starts to move away from the "easy" bit of "EasyInstall", but to be honest, EasyInstall is no easier *for me* than double clicking on a bdist_wininst executable. Paul.

2 3

EasyInstall: bootstrapping
by Ian Bicking 04 Jun '05

04 Jun '05

I added a subcommand to Paste "paster install X", which is basically just easy_install with some hooks into Paste's configuration. But anyway, now I'm wondering how to get the whole thing going. You can't run easy_install without setuptools installed. I'm inclined to install easy_install with easy_install, but obviously that won't work ;) Of course, I can download the egg and put that into the path; that's what Paste's setup.py does currently (which also gives me package_data on older Pythons as well). But where should I put the egg? For setup.py it doesn't matter that much, but it matters more when I want to keep it around for future commands. Should I download it, put it on the path, then use it to install itself? I dunno, I'm just feeling a little mixed up. I'm also thinking I could start installing things globally now that there's essentially versioned imports... except that I probably have to hardcode the versions when deploying, so I don't accidentally upgrade apps without meaning to. Or I can stick with app-packages to be extra safe. -- Ian Bicking / ianb(a)colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

2 3

Python Eggs: Major documentation update
by Phillip J. Eby 04 Jun '05

04 Jun '05

I've just completed a major update to the Python Eggs documentation at: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs There is an all-new API reference that gives detailed coverage of the most important classes and functions provided by the "pkg_resources" runtime module, as well as an expanded "Developing with Eggs" section that explains more about namespace packages, developing from source checkouts, and how to update modules to find their data files using the resource API instead of by __file__ manipulation that won't work from inside zip files. Please let me know if you have any questions or find any problems. Thanks!

1 0

EasyInstall: installing from svn
by Ian Bicking 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

Now I'm feeling confused about how installation from svn should work. Or more generally, how deployment and development work. Usually in development, I like to install libraries directly out of svn (no distutil step). Then I can fiddle with them if necessary, commit changes (or create diffs if I don't have commit access), etc. This is all much easier to do when there's no distutil step. When deploying, that's not really what I want to do, even though I might very well be deploying from a repository. What easy_install does now with svn repositories is good in that case. The problem is that the two are conflicting. If I require a package, I'm not going to get the svn checkout, even if the checkout was on the path initially. Since the egg package names don't map to Python packages, you can't even really tell that a package is already available without egg installation. The only way I can think of right now to safely do this would be: try: import wsgiutils except ImportError: require('WSGI-Utils') Ick. So how can I set up a working environment that is close, but not too close, to the deployment environment? Maybe there's a way that, up front, I can specify which packages are made available through alternate methods? E.g., fulfill_requirement('WSGI-Utils', 'checkouts/WSGIUtils') (where adding the second path to sys.path will fulfill the requirement, irrespective of any eggs). Ian

3 2

EasyInstall: non-distutil packages
by Ian Bicking 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

I'm starting to think that some sort of patch system is the best way to get non-distutil packages installed. One of the reasons is that I just got it in my head that I'd like to install Javascript libraries using this stuff, and they certainly aren't going to have setup.py's. I don't actually know how that's going to work... but I think there's something useful there. But then, I'm not sure if patches are even that important. Instead maybe it makes sense to create a package that doesn't include the data, but fetches it on installation. You could just distribute a zip file with one member (setup.py) that used urllib or svn to fetch the installation. But, well, the more appropriate way to do this would be to use easy_install's functions for downloading and unpacking. But... does that mean that the setup.py has the location hardcoded of the non-distutil package it is installing? That's a little annoying. I dunno... I haven't thought this through, but this is what I'm thinking at the moment. (I happen to be deploying some software today, and using easy_install a little, and thinking about how I can use it more) -- Ian Bicking / ianb(a)colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

1 0