"Ehle, Brandon" <BEhle@ea.com> writes:

I'm trying to create a setup programming that deploys python plus all the required extensions packages. Rather than have person who is installing click next four gazillion times, I'd like for the extension module packages to run in a quiet mode where it starts up, shows the install process and then exits without any user intervention (short of fatal errors). For most of the extensions I need to install, this seems to work ok (they are installing via InnoSetup and -veryquiet), but any packages that were released with bdist_wininst do not seem to support this feature.

Is this a feature that could be added to future releases of distutils? The RPM packages install in a non-interactive mode so I believe it would make sense to offer this same functionality on windows.

Sure it could ;-), but it requires major restructuring of the bdist_wininst C code.

Obviously any old bdist_wininst packages aren't going to have this functionality yet. Is there some trick that I might be able to get this to work with any current bdist_wininst packages?

I see at least two possibilities: 1. Install Python and all packages you want to distribute on some machine, and repackage all of this in a new installer (inno, wise, nsis, whatever) and distribute that. IMO this is basically what ActiveState does. 2. bdist_wininst installers are zipfiles whith a small executable stub. You could write a Python script which opens the installer with zipfile.ZipFile, and do the unpacking and installation yourself. Should be a matter of one or two hours. Regards, Thomas