[Distutils] Prerelease: bdist_wininst

[Thomas Heller]

> Hi,
> 
> I haven't tried it yet, but there are some problems.
> 
> First of all, you use the zlib module, which is not
> always installed. (It is comment out in python's
> source code.) Would it be possible to use an external
> zip program as make_zipfile in archive_util.py does?
It is only used to compress the ini-file which will
not have more than a some hundred bytes. These could easily
go uncompressed.
I found the compressed base64 encoded bytes of the exe-file
nice in bdist_wininst, but there will also be another solution.

The funny thing is:
- On windows it is enabled by default.
- On windows, there is usually no external zip-program (I suspect
many people will have winzip installed, but this has no command
line interface).
- Python 1.6 will include the zipfile module, which would not be
very usefull without zlib.
BTW: My suse 6.2 box which I occasionally use HAS zlib enabled.

So: Do we really have to assume zlib is unavailable?
> 
> 
> Second you use struct without to specify the byte-order,
> for Windows you need little-endian. (Sun uses
> big-endian, and your installer wouldn't work?) 
Oops, will fix that.

> And finally, it seems you use the registry to find out if there 
> is a python installation.
Yes, finding python installations is something I have scheduled
for later.

> 
> kind regards
> 
> Rene Liebscher
> 
Thanks for the feedback.

Thomas