Beginning of support for binary distributions
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Hi all -- I've just checked in the beginnings of support for creating "built distributions" (aka binary distributions, but of course they aren't necessarily binary -- you might want to distribute something that is immediately installable but contains only Python code). This consists of two commands so far, 'bdist' and 'bdist_dumb'. These follow the model of the 'build' and 'install' families, where there is one high-level coordinator, and "sub-commands" that do the real work. So far, obviously, there's only one bdist sub-command, and all it creates are "dumb" built distributions -- tarballs and zip files that you unpack from <prefix> or <exec-prefix>. There are a number of obvious weaknesses to this, but this was intended more as a warm-up exercise than the real thing. First of all, the end user has to somehow know to chdir to Python's <prefix> or <exec-prefix> and unpack the dumb distribution there. Worse, they have to know to sometimes chdir to to <prefix>, and sometimes <exec-prefix> -- assuming there's even a difference on their system. Anyways, as I said, this is *not* the be-all, end-all to creating built Python module distributions! However, it's all that I could whip up in three evenings. If you'd like to try it out, please do! Here's the basic idea: python setup.py bdist or: python setup.py bdist --formats=gztar # or zip, tar, or ztar The default format is currently gztar for Unix, zip for Windows. Obviously, that will have to get a bit more complicated: we'll want to create an RPM on RPM-based systems, a Debian package on Debian systems, a BSD package on BSD systems, some sort of executable installer (probably Wise) on Windows systems, etc. But for now, you get either a tarball or a zipfile, and if you don't specify --formats, you get whatever is sensible on your current OS. For example, if I go to my NumPy 15.2 directory (which is identical to the NumPy 15.2 distribution, *except* I use the example NumPy setup script included with the Distutils!) and run this: $ python setup.py bdist then I get (roughly) this output: [...build output omitted...] creating build/bdist creating build/bdist/lib creating build/bdist/lib/python1.5 creating build/bdist/lib/python1.5/site-packages creating build/bdist/lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric hard linking build/lib.linux-i586/ArrayPrinter.py -> build/bdist/lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric hard linking build/lib.linux-i586/FFT.py -> build/bdist/lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric [...and so on, for all modules that NumPy would install...] changing into 'build/bdist' tar -cf /scratch/python/Numerical-15.2/Numerical-15.2.linux-i586.tar . gzip /scratch/python/Numerical-15.2/Numerical-15.2.linux-i586.tar changing back to '/scratch/python/Numerical-15.2' and the resulting tarball, Numerical-15.2.linux-i586.tar.gz, looks like this: $ tar tzf Numerical-15.2.linux-i586.tar.gz ./ lib/ lib/python1.5/ lib/python1.5/site-packages/ lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/ lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/ArrayPrinter.py lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/FFT.py lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/LinearAlgebra.py [...] lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/ranlib.so lib/python1.5/site-packages/Numeric/arrayfns.so which reduces installing Numerical Python to a mere $ cd `python -c "import sys; print sys.exec_prefix"` $ tar xzvf /scratch/python/Numerical-15.2/Numerical-15.2.linux-i586.tar.gz OK, OK, so it's not immediately obvious that this is better than a simple "python setup.py install". ;-) But think of the possibilities! Known bugs: * if a distribution needs a .pth file, it is neither created nor included in the built distribution Feel free to add to this list... Greg -- Greg Ward - just another /P(erl|ython)/ hacker gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science--it is opinion.
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Greg Ward