At 03:20 PM 7/7/2007 +1000, Mark Hammond wrote:
Hi Jim,
Since you happen to be paying attention to distributions atm ... :)
I would love to see a pywin32 egg, which by definition, didn't need to modify anything when it was installed. I guess there are some features in pywin32 that wouldn't work with such a setup, but I'm guessing that most features would. Even if it wasn't called pywin32, I'd really like to see an egg that contained the parts of pywin32 that can be used without modifying anything on installation.
Please. Pretty please. :) It would make pywin32 much mroe usable for people using setuptools.
I'm sure you know the drill - patches are always welcome :) I've never modified a setup script to support eggs, and at this stage I'm more interested in getting existing functionality ported to x64 and Vista than creating a new distribution with reduced functionality.
Also, if part of the functionality we had to drop was implementing COM objects (and we would if we couldn't install stuff into system32 or modify the HKLM part of the registry), then I'd be reluctant to call this a suitable distribution for anyone other than people wishing to package pywin32 with their own custom application, and I'd struggle to justify spending much time creating and supporting a distribution just for them.
I'm trying to remember for sure, but ISTR that I've successfully installed pywin32 in egg form. Ah yes, I did, and it's working for me in one of my Python installations. Don't remember how I did it though!
[pause to try and install it with easy_install in another Python installation]
Ah. Okay, first, pywin32 isn't registered on PyPI, so you need a -f link to find the files:
easy_install -f http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78018 pywin32
This is easily fixed by adding a PyPI listing with the above URL registered as the "Download URL".
easy_install successfully installs the package, but in order to do the registry and copying stuff, the postinstall script has to be run:
$ Scripts/pywin32_postinstall.py -install Traceback (most recent call last): File "Scripts\pywin32_postinstall.py", line 5, in ? pkg_resources.run_script('pywin32==210', 'pywin32_postinstall.py') File "c:\cygwin\home\pje\projects\setuptools-0.6\pkg_resources.py", line 448, in run_script self.require(requires)[0].run_script(script_name, ns) File "c:\cygwin\home\pje\projects\setuptools-0.6\pkg_resources.py", line 1166, in run_script execfile(script_filename, namespace, namespace) File "c:\cygwin\home\pje\chandlerstuff\chandler\release\bin\lib\site-packages\pywin32-210-py2.4-win32.egg\EGG-INFO\scripts\pywin32_postinstall.py", line 365, in ? install() File "c:\cygwin\home\pje\chandlerstuff\chandler\release\bin\lib\site-packages\pywin32-210-py2.4-win32.egg\EGG-INFO\scripts\pywin32_postinstall.py", line 155, in install LoadSystemModule(lib_dir, "pywintypes") File "c:\cygwin\home\pje\chandlerstuff\chandler\release\bin\lib\site-packages\pywin32-210-py2.4-win32.egg\EGG-INFO\scripts\pywin32_postinstall.py", line 94, in LoadSystemModule ('.dll', 'rb', imp.C_EXTENSION)) ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.
The problem here is that lib_dir is calculated using the system configuration, instead of by locating where the package is actually installed. I changed the install() function like this:
import timer lib_dir = os.path.dirname(timer.__file__)
Importing some other pywin32 module than 'timer' would be okay; it just looked like something small and unlikely to depend on anything else. With this change, the install script produced this output::
$ Scripts/pywin32_postinstall.py` -install Copied pythoncom24.dll to C:\WINDOWS\system32\pythoncom24.dll Copied pywintypes24.dll to C:\WINDOWS\system32\pywintypes24.dll Registered: Python.Interpreter Registered: Python.Dictionary Registered: Python -> Software\Python\PythonCore\2.4\Help[None]=None -> Software\Python\PythonCore\2.4\Help\Pythonwin Reference[None]='C:\...\lib\site-packages\pywin32-210-py2.4-win32.egg\PyWin32.chm' Creating directory C:...\bin\lib\site-packages\pywin32-210-py2.4-win32.egg\win32com\gen_py The pywin32 extensions were successfully installed.
Is there anything I can do to verify that this did in fact work correctly?
It appears that all would be needed for pywin32 to be fully easy_install-able would be this change to the postinstall script (which shouldn't affect its functionality for direct installation), and an entry on PyPI. No setup script changed required -- or so it appears. Anyone wishing to use the features enabled by the postinstall script would just need to run it with -install.
One question of course is, what features do you lose if you don't run the postinstall? If I hadn't run it, would I still have been able to use Python to access COM objects exposed by other applications, or would I have been unable to do COM at all?