[Distutils] Re: distutils, tutorials and documentation

[Greg Ward]

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!!