Hi,

We're using distribute to package our software, but we'd like to do something different with the "sdist" command. We would like to recursively find all packages necessary to build our package from a base Python install, download these packages, and store them all in a directory inside our source distribution tarball; then, when the tarball is unpacked and setup.py is run, we want "install" to use those cached packages. (This is to support installation on machines that can't or shouldn't access the network.)

One solution I found in the distribute docs was to use easy_install -zmaxd dirname package on our package to generate and store dependency eggs, and then easy_install -H none -f dirname when installing the package. Unfortunately this actually builds packages which have C extensions and stuff like that in them, whereas we would like to only ship the source and build the dependencies when our package is built (to support multiple platforms). Also I guess we'd like setup.py install to just work in the directory without the user having to care about the fact that these source packages were shipped inside the tarball they just extracted.

So I'm wondering if I can actually do this by importing something from distribute itself and writing some nontrivial code in setup.py. Can someone point me to what would be the best way to do this?

I'm guessing I'll need to start by subclassing Environment to create a fake "default environment" which looks like how a bare Python 2.7.3 (say) install would. Then I'd need to somehow modify "sdist" somewhere to make it download the dependency tarballs that would be necessary if you were installing our packages into that Environment, and also need to modify "install" to make it look in the correct directory. Is that about right?

Thanks and sorry for the simple question.

-Keshav