"Mark W. Alexander" wrote:

... So to implement sub-package support, each individual bdist_* module has to be visited.

Where you say "sub-package" I think you mean what I call "distribution unit" or "component".

The relevance here is that the bdist_generic class would have built-in sub-package support which would then be inherited to all (capable) package managers.

I agree that some stuff could be abstracted into a base class but I still think that every bdist has to be touched to implement embedded distribution units. For instance Windows EXE would probably have to uncompress the embedded executables to a temporary directory, recursively execute them and then delete them. RPM would have to do something similar in a Unix-y way. Paul Prescod