[Distutils] Prerelease: bdist_wininst

[Rene Liebscher]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> 
> I found the compressed base64 encoded bytes of the exe-file
> nice in bdist_wininst, but there will also be another solution.
> 
If it would be a base64 encoded zip-file which contains this 
exe-file you could use zipfile or a real zip program
as make_zipfile in archive_util.py does.

> 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?
I tried four systems, Windows and SuSE 6.2 had zlib,
another Linux and AIX didn't have it. But I still can
on the latter two do a "bdist --formats=zip" because
an external zip is available.

I tried it meanwhile, it looks great. But I found a new
problem.
If you don't provide a long description, it is set to 
None(?), so the marked line fails.
>         # 'info' will be displayed in the installers dialog box,
>         # describing the items to be installed
> ====>   info = metadata.long_description + '\n'
> 
>         for name in dir (metadata):
>             if (name != 'long_description'):
>         
 

kind regards

Rene Liebscher