[Distutils] util.copy_file and --dry-run

[Greg Ward]

On 20 May 2000, Bastian Kleineidam said:
>   I found a misleading behaviour with the --dry-run option. Suppose you
>   create a directory and then you copy a file in this directory. With
>   --dry-run the directory is not created and this makes the copy_file
>   function to announce the renaming of the file rather than copying it
>   into the new directory.
>   
>   code snippet:
>   ./setup.py --dry-run build
>   [...]
>   creating build/scripts
>   copying linkchecker -> build
>   
>   should be:
>   creating build/scripts
>   copying linkchecker -> build/scripts

Ooh, sneaky sneaky!  This is both a feature and a bug, if you'll buy
that.  I've just changed how 'copy_file()' does its verbose output so
that the feature part outweighs the bug part.  ('copy_file()' still
misunderstands what it's doing in dry-run mode when you try to copy to a
directory that doesn't exist.  But it now prints output that makes it
*look* like it knows what it's doing.  Since this only affects the
verbose output in dry-run mode, I think that *looking* good is good
enough.)

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - geek                                        gward@python.net
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