I have a vague idea a new bdist format that I'd like to bounce off you all before I start thinking about it too hard. In other words, please shoot holes in it. The bdist_dumb formats have exactly that problem: they're too dumb. They basically create a tarfile (or other archive type) with full pathnames in it and that's it. However, there could be a bdist_xxx which would create a tarfile in which everything was relative, but the directory parts are magic. If you extract this tarfile with a normal tar you would get a directory with under it directories INSTALL_BASE, INSTALL_PLATBASE, ROOT, etc etc etc. Or maybe all these would be rooted in a xxx/platform.machine.version directory, probably a better idea. The tar file would also contain the setup.py script. The next part of the idea is that distutils would also learn about an install_xxx command. The default version of this command would simply copy the relevant files from xxx/platform.machine.version to their required locations, but it could of course be customized by the author of the setup script. The final part of the idea is that "install" gets a bit of magic so it notices it is being run from an xxx installation directory. In this case it doesn't go through the build/install sequence, but quickly calls install_xxx. I'm not sure about the magic needed, it could test for the current directory only containing setup.py and xxx (and maybe a couple of files like README and such), it could test for missing source files, I'm not really sure. And maybe this whole bit of magic isn't needed, and the end user will just have to learn to type "install_xxx", if we find a good enough name for xxx. -- - Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com> http://www.cwi.nl/~jack - - If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman -