[Distutils] bdist broken under Windows

[Greg Ward]

On 23 May 2000, Thomas Heller said:
> The bdist command in the CVS version is broken under windows.
> 
> 1. It seems the needed directories are not created:

Hmm, that shouldn't be too hard to fix... but I wonder why it's not
happening?  Arg... 

> 2. This error occurrs only after hacking around the second problem:
> change_root(), which is not implemented for nt.
> 
> Having said this, I cannot really understand the purpose of change_root.
> 
> Finally I tried distutils under Linux, and it seems that
> change_root converts relative into (nearly) absolute pathnames:
>     usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils/...
> 
> This MAY make sense under unix, where python is always(?) installed
> in the same path, but not under windows!

Python is most certainly *not* always installed in the same place on
Unix!  The purpose of 'change_root()' is to change (eg.)
"/usr/lib/python1.5/site-package/distutils" (where the "install" command
would normally install the distutils on a Red Hat system) to
"build/bdist.linux2-i586/dumb/usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils"
(where it gets installed to create a "dumb" built distribution -- we cd
to "build/bdist.linux2-i586/dumb" and then create a tarball or zip file
which is meant to be unpacked from the root directory).

Make sense?  Hope so -- I'm zonked and have to hit the sack.
Damn... another night of just dealing with email, no time to code...

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - just another Python hacker                  gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.