I've just tried to create a wininst based version of my packages. The installer works great except for a few nits:
* the text box showing the description could be wider Probably the text shown in this box should be reformatted by bdist_wininst to better fit in the box... Currently the 'packager' has to do it manually.
* no documentation files are installed -- is there a way to get those installed somewhere wininst follows distutils very closely and does not care about this.
* the installer install directly into \Python20 -- shouldn't it install to \Python20\Lib ? What's the standard here on Windows ? This is the standard on windows. \Python20\Lib is treated as location for modules belonging to core python. Note that this behaviour has one serious consequence: Since the distutils distributed with python are in \python20\lib\distutils, and installing a new version of distutils will install in \python20\distutils, and c:\python20\lib appears in sys.path *before* c:\python20, it requires special actions to actually *use* this newly installed distutils: The user has to delete or renamed or otherwise disable the directory \python20\lib\distutils. * the installer doesn't register itself in the Windows Software registry -- an uninstall is not possible (this would be *very* nice to have) This is something I have in my mind for a long time, but since distutils itself does not care about uninstalling I've never done it. The hooks are all there in wininst: A callback is called for every action taken on the filesystem during installation. It would be easy to write a log file which could be used for uninstallation.
Any hints ?
-- Marc-Andre Lemburg
Regards, Thomas