Mark Hammond schrieb:
The pywin32 extensions require (well, prefer) administrative access during installation - certain files are copied to the System32 directory and the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is written to. Also, if I understand correctly, if Python happened to be installed into "\Program Files", admin access would be required to create any files in that directory tree - I'm not sure what permissions the \PythonXX directory are created with, but its not unreasable to assume that some shops might choose to secure that directory similarly to "\Program Files". [...]
So I see a few alternatives, but none are very desirable:
I have not yet even used vista, so I fear I cannot answer your questions, or even offer an opinion...
* Only make this "admin required" check if a specific version of Python is necessary (ie, the package contains extension modules). This would leave pure-python packages out in the cold.
* Live with the ugly UI that would result in performing that check after the Python version has been selected, and add the command-line processing necessary to make this work.
This sound like the most universal option to me.
* Ignore the issue and try to educate people that they must explicitly use "Run as Administrator" for such packages on Vista.
What if the user does not have or cannot get admin rights? Can he not install the package then?
I'm wondering if anyone has any opinions or thoughts on how we should handle this?
bdist_wininst has its own problems anyway - most severe the MSVC runtime dll issue. Another one is that it won't work for 64-bit installations. bdist_msi solves the 64-bit and MSVCRT issue. I would expect that it also solves the UAC problems. OTOH it is not possible (AFAIK) to build bdist_msi installers on Linux systems. Thomas