Greg Ward:

On 28 August 2000, Amos Latteier said:

...

I've thought about this a little. It seems to me that the basic desire is to be able to run setup from python, not the command line. I think we could accommodate this with something like this

distutils.core.run_setup(file, commands)

Hmmm, that does look cleaner for your needs than setting a global mode variable. (Of course, it might end up setting a global mode variable behind the scenes, but never mind that. If I break 'setup()' up into its constituent parts, or farm more of it off to the Distribution class, that shouldn't be necessary.)

However, since I just went ahead and implemented 'script_name' and 'script_args' arguments to 'setup()', this is not needed for Paul's case.

So distutils.core.setup(script_name=file, script_args=commands) is the same as distutils.core.run_setup(file, commands)?

If so, is there any need for a run_setup function?

...

In my case I'll probably write a new command called something like 'metadata' that doesn't do anything but return meta-data about the distribution.

We've been down this road before! The outcome was the DistributionMetadata class, defined in dist.py. Once you have a Distribution object, you can query its metadata using 'get_description()', 'get_fullname()', etc.

...

I think I would spell this:

dist = distutils.core.run_setup('foo-1.0/setup.py', stop_after="init")

and then you can do this:

print "%s (version %s), provided by %s" % (dist.get_name(), dist.get_version(), dist.get_contact())

Seem reasonable?

Yes!

I don't care about the exact spelling, I just want access to the Distribution object from Python. However... to me run_setup seems different enough from setup to be a different function. Also stop_after=init seems fairly close to a command to me. But I promise to stop quibbling ;-) Whatever you decide is great.

Thanks!

-Amos

-- Amos Latteier mailto:amos@digicool.com Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com