[Distutils] Installation questions

[Paul Prescod]

I'm a distutils newbie so I'm just trying to find my way around.

I notice that even though (e.g.) numpy is built using distutils, the
windows binary zipfile does not come with a setup.py for installation.
The setup is pretty brain-dead (just unzip to a particular location) but
I'm thinking of a future where Python binaries on a particular platform
have a known structure so that they can be installed in a generic way.
In other words, I'd like it to be more brain-dead: more like an RPM or
MSI where the internal binary distribution structure is well-known.

I tried to implement this for a few packages as an experiment (first not
using distutils, and then using distutils).

I decided that all of the packages would have a top-level "install.py".
I was writing small tools to find the Python lib directory, copy the
files and so forth but then I realized that I was duplicating some of
the work of distutils (which does have an install option, after all). So
then I started to use distutils and the "setup.py" convention.

The structure of my modules is

/foo/__init__.py
/foo/bar/__init__.py
/foo/bar/something.pyd

Installing the ".py"s is easy because of "packages=". But distutils
misses the .pyd. Is it doing the right thing? Or should it blindly copy
.pyd's as part of a package.

Also, is distutil install supposed to do anything with documentation? It
would be nice if there were a standard place for Python module
documentation.

 Paul