On 8/11/05, Phillip J. Eby
At 10:40 AM 8/11/2005 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
there's a transitional problem with bdist_wininst installers, which needs some thinking about (and no, easy_install's "convert a wininst installer to an egg" feature isn't an answer - it loses things like cx_Oracle's documentation,
FYI, if there's a source distribution, the new --editable option (in CVS) allows you to download and extract the source for editing, without building it or anything.
I'm not sure how that helps. If there's a source, I can just run setup.py bdist_wininst anyway, so I don't see the difference.
I could probably actually add postinstall hooks to EasyInstall, except that it sort of goes against the concept of eggs being a "zero install" format. It's worth thinking about/investigating though.
Given that the trend seems to be to install eggs via easy_install, I'm not sure "zero install" still applies. But if I can still just drop eggs into sys.path, maybe it does. Must review this stuff again.
That's not going to happen real soon; only a relatively tiny number of people even know eggs exist, and as long as they have a reasonably-usable bdist_wininst available then it's certainly a valid choice to just distribute that, thereby pleasing EasyInstall users and non-users alike.
That's what I thought. And it makes me reluctant to bother with eggs for standard packages at all, sadly. (Plugins etc are a completely different matter - for them, I think it's a wonderful technology!)
Some packages of course may be eventually only be distributed as eggs. For example, I'm switching all of my win32 binary distributions to eggs, which means you'll have to compile from source if you want a bdist_wininst.
Which is probably what I'll do. But I thought setuptools no longer works if it's installed via bdist_wininst? Sorry, I have to run now (shouldn't have started this email...) I'll comment more later. Paul.