[Distutils] Installation questions

[Thomas Heller]

> 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.

Have you tried the bdist_wininst command?
  'python setup.py bdist_wininst'
or
  'python setup.py bdist --formats=wininst'
should do exactly what you are asking for.

Thomas