At 06:48 AM 10/4/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
I'm working on new installation instructions for setuptools 0.6c4, which will no longer use ez_setup.py for end-user manual installation of setuptools (as opposed to bundled installation with another package).
This seems to me to be a pretty huge change for a c4 release. Why not get 0.6 final out and do this for 0.7?
Because I want 0.6 to be very stable; 0.7 may be a long time coming. The idea is to start making setuptools into *infrastructure*: something you just install like Python, not something that you need an automatic updater for. :)
I'm looking for any feedback people might have, on the installation process itself or on the directions. Some particular areas of question/concern: * Should ez_setup perhaps launch a web browser pointing to these instructions, instead of trying to download setuptools itself? (This would bypass most of those annoying proxy problems right off the bat, at least when just installing setuptools.)
Would it be possible, instead to provide a proxy option to easy_install/ez_setup (and the underlying setptools apis)?
The HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy environment variable controls proxying for Python programs, including easy_install and ez_setup.py. What doesn't work is if they require NTLM authentication, which is not built into urllib. As long as the information is available in the Windows registry or environment, and NTLM auth isn't needed, it should work. But when NTLM auth is required, easy_install isn't going to work unless you use a proxy program like the one at http://ntlmaps.sf.net/
* The new install procedure bypasses firewall issues for installing setuptools itself, but doesn't do anything about the issue for packages that have dependencies. Is there anything else that can be done about that?
Yes, provide a proxy option, ideally one that can be read from a configuration file.
That's probably not a bad idea, since it would be more discoverable than the environment variable and registry stuff. However, I'll have to tone up my urllib-fu in order to do that, as I have no idea how to set the proxy information from *code* (as opposed to the environment). It also won't help with ez_setup.py, which doesn't have any configuration file abilities or command-line option parsing of its own, although I could perhaps add the necessary arguments to the ez_setup API, since it's going away as a command-line tool anyway.