On 20 July 2000, Igor V. Rafienko said:

[I'm not sure whether this should have gone to the distutils mailing list]

Yeah, probably. I'll cc the list -- nothing private here, except my embarassment about state of the Distutils docs.

I was wondering whether the missing documentation (for instance <URL:http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/doc/dist/extend-existing.html>, or an entire chapter 8 and 9 for that matter) was a result of my unwillingness to dig deeper on <URL:http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/doc/> or an implementation feature of the documentation? ;)

There's nothing there yet because I haven't written it yet. You haven't missed anything.

Seriously, I've got a somewhat particular mix of python, C, and SQL code that is supposed to be luser-friendly to install. After snooping a little bit around, it looked like distutils was the right way to go. However, I'm unable to find any detailed documentation on writing install scripts with distutils, short of looking at the source code. Since you've written most of the documentation I could find, I thought that maybe you could give a couple of hints as to where I should look.

See examples/sample3/setup.py in the Distutils 0.9 distribution for a slightly silly example of writing custom commands. For a real-world example, Numerical Python used to require a custom command to install C headers, but not any more -- you can see the old setup script in the Numerical 15.2 release. After you've taken a look at those examples, *please* flood the list with questions. ;-) This will 1) prod me into writing the docs, and 2) give me some idea of what needs the most documenting. Thanks -- Greg -- Greg Ward - maladjusted computer geek gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ I once decorated my apartment entirely in ten foot salad forks!!