From: "M.-A. Lemburg" mal@lemburg.com
... customized installs, add auxiliary package installs such as MDAC or ship MSVC DLLs etc.
I have the impression that in these times (file system protection in win2000) it is even more complicated to get it right, or maybe even impossible to replace/update system dlls. I remember having looked (some time ago, win95 was current at that time) into the WISE supplied ODBC install script, IIRC it didn't really look so easy.
Creating an bdist_inno would probably be more or less trivial, on the other hand distutils would have to be extended to allow specifying these DLLs.
bdist_wininst is perfect for pure Python packages and probably most binary extensions too, but there are a small number of instances which do require more functionality and since Inno Setup is free, I thought it would be a good idea to add support for it to distutils.
Are you more heading towards installing python extensions together with their binary dependecies, or towards installing Python applications (the 'scripts=...' part)?
(IMO creating an inno setup script would be very useful for py2exe, but this is probably a different issue...)
Thomas