[Distutils] Two thoughts on bdist_rpm

[Greg Ward]

Well, my first real experience with bdist_rpm was last Thursday, putting
together the Distutils 0.9 RPM.  I also built RPMs for NumPy and
mxDateTime just to see if it would work (it did, mostly).

Some comments:

  * is it really necessary to run "build" twice?  This takes quite a
    while with NumPy (with two source files > 600k) on a 100 MHz
    Pentium, and I don't think it's necessary -- you *should* just
    be able to ask the "build" command what its outputs would have
    been with 'get_outputs()'

  * the .spec file is always generated with "python setup.py ..."
    commands, even if I ran "/usr/local/bin/python1.6 setup.py ..."
    to generate the RPM.  Thus, if I use a non-standard Python to
    create the .spec file, it still uses the standard /usr/bin/python,
    and I end up with an RPM that goes in
    /usr/lib/python1.5/site-pacakges.   I'm not saying that an RPM
    that installs to /usr/local/lib/python1.6/site-packages is
    necessarily a good thing to be distributing, but if I use that
    python to make the RPM...

  * should we put the output RPMs (source and "binary" -- not really a
    binary for pure-Python distributions, but you-know-what-I-mean)
    in a more convenient place?  If I didn't know the system intimately,
    it would not have occurred to me to look for the built RPM in
    build/bdist.linux2/rpm/RPMS/noarch.  ;-)

    I'm thinking that a common directory for distribution bureaucracy
    is a good idea, and we already have a start: putting .spec files
    in "dist" if bdist_rpm is *only* generating the .spec file.  So
    here's a short list of what could go in "dist" right now:
      - .spec file
      - RPMs
      - Win32 exes
      - source distributions (tarball, zip file)
      - dumb built distributions (tarball, zip file)

    Currently, all of these things wind up wherever they feel (mostly in 
    the distribution root, but also a few other places).  This just
    seems like a really good idea to me, so unless anyone howls I'm
    going to go ahead and implement it.

    In future, there could be a "debian" subdirectory of "dist", and
    maybe a directory of FreeBSD "port" info (if that's how it works --
    not really clear on that).  A Wise script could also go there, if
    you need to generate a full-blow Windows installer instead of
    Thomas' minimalist self-extracting ZIP file.

Comments?

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - Linux geek                                  gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
I'm a nuclear submarine under the polar ice cap and I need a Kleenex!