Guido wrote:
[Great analysis, Tim!]
4) The audience is Python end-users "in general", and the product is pure Python. I think this is the most important one for Distutils to address, and compilation isn't a part of it. So far, though, what Gordon is doing seems more appropriate than what Distutils has been up to. I hope his work gets folded into this.
I'm not sure what stuff by which Gordon you're referring to. I am only familiar with his installer, which I thought is win32 only (but I may be mistaken) and is an installer for a whole application, not just a bunch of modules. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It needed a name. I hate the word "Installer", but it expresses in one word the most common use of my stuff. I'll be releasing a beta for Linux real soon. Only some of the tricks are Windows only (such as self-extracting executables, which is only culturally appropriate on Windows, anyway). But more importantly it's not just for installing. The Python I use (interactively) on my wife's machine is 1 directory with about 6 files in it. On my Linux box I've been using the std lib in a .pyz for about a month now. Someone distributing a pure Python package could instead ship 3 files (imputil.py, archive.py and <package>.pyz) with the "install" consisting of adding one line to site.py in the user's perfectly normal Python installation. And yeah, I solved the "manifest" problem, too. Mine predates Distutils, so don't accuse me of duplicate effort, (I pointed them to it a couple times). It uses ConfigParser and a config file, so it allows finer control. While .pyz's are completely cross-platform, I have yet to work out endianness issues in the other archive I use (which should probably be zip format - it can hold anything). And at the "Installer" end, I have yet to work out how things should work on non-ELF/COFF platforms (where I can't append the archive to the executable). But there aren't any technical issues involved; just lack of time. So no, it's not just for Windows; and no, it's not just for creating standalones (though that's what almost everyone uses it for). - Gordon