At 11:19 AM 9/15/2005 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
Every so often, there's a perennial debate on the distutils-sig about script filenames. Should they have .py extensions or not? What about .pyw apps on Windows? What about Mac OS? and so on.
...
So, if these "main" functions were simply declared as entry points in the project's setup script, then EasyInstall could automatically generate stub scripts for them, in a platform-appropriate fashion, with no need for '-m', "__name__=='__main__'", or fiddling with file extensions. For example, if PyUnit were distributed as an egg, with the following entry points:
[distutils.console_apps] unittest = unittest:mainThen EasyInstall could create a 'unittest' script with a #! line on Unix-like OSes, and a 'unittest.py', 'unittest.bat', or 'unittest.exe' on Windows. In each case, the generated program would simply load and run the entry point with no arguments.
FYI, I've now implemented console script generation in the CVS version of setuptools, except that I decided to call the entry point group "console_scripts". There is a custom .exe launcher for Windows, too. The whole thing was surprisingly easy to implement, and the docs are updated in CVS as well. I'll probably implement the find_package_data() thing this weekend as well, and put it out as an 0.6a2 release.
Note that generated scripts can't be run with -m, but then again neither can a lot of things. ;) Using -m scripts means your eggs can't be installed compressed anyway, so these "new-style" scripts are superior in almost every way. You don't need an if __name__=='__main__', you don't need separate scripts, just write your "main" function in a module somewhere and list the entry point in your setup().
Anyway, for backward-compatibility I'm still allowing "python -m easy_install" in the next release or two, but a warning is printed to the console. Later, this feature will be removed so that it's possible to install setuptools in compressed form.