[Distutils] Prerelease: bdist_wininst

[Greg Ward]

On 15 June 2000, Thomas Heller said:
> It is only used to compress the ini-file which will
> not have more than a some hundred bytes. These could easily
> go uncompressed.

If zlib is available by default on Windows, go ahead and use it.  I
don't imagine that creating Windows installers on Unix will be more than
a small sideline, simply because of the lack of cross-compilation.
Also, we can generally expect that people creating built distributions
will be fairly sophisticated Pythoneers, at least sophisticated enough
to comment out the "zlib" line in Setup when building Python.

> I found the compressed base64 encoded bytes of the exe-file
> nice in bdist_wininst, but there will also be another solution.

I find it really weird, but if it works...

How problematic would it be just to include a wininst_stub.exe right in
the Distutils source (ie. under CVS control, installed alongside the
code and system config file)?  If it's small enough to include encoded
in Python source, then IMHO it's small enough to include as a separate
file in the source tree.  You would then find the stub in the same way
as the system config file is found:
  os.path.dirname(sys.modules['distutils'])

BTW, what was your alternate plan for finding the exe stub?

Oh, let me know when/if you want me to check this code in: the patch of
course is trivial, and I will read through bdist_wininst.py itself just
for paranoia's sake.  But if you're happy enough with it to let it go in
CVS and code snapshots, just say the word.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - maladjusted computer geek                   gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
There are no stupid questions -- only stupid people.