[Distutils] bdist_innoinst ?!

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> 
> From: "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com>
> > ... customized installs, add auxiliary package installs such as
> > MDAC or ship MSVC DLLs etc.
> 
> I have the impression that in these times (file system protection
> in win2000) it is even more complicated to get it right, or maybe
> even impossible to replace/update system dlls. I remember having
> looked (some time ago, win95 was current at that time) into the
> WISE supplied ODBC install script, IIRC it didn't really look so easy.

True, but all of these installers do try to handle system DLLs
which is way beyond the scope of wininst. I'd say better keep
wininst nice and simple (well, at least the frontend ;-) and
let the big installer packages handle the rest of the scoop.
 
> Creating an bdist_inno would probably be more or less trivial,
> on the other hand distutils would have to be extended to
> allow specifying these DLLs.

Sure, but that wouldn't be much of a problem: you can add
as many options to bdist_inno as you want (and then store
the less often used ones in your setup.cfg file).
 
> > bdist_wininst is perfect for pure Python packages and probably
> > most binary extensions too, but there are a small number
> > of instances which do require more functionality and since
> > Inno Setup is free, I thought it would be a good idea to add
> > support for it to distutils.
> 
> Are you more heading towards installing python extensions together
> with their binary dependecies, or towards installing Python
> applications (the 'scripts=...' part)?

Both; I'd like to ship py2exe style programs using an installer
(which also includes the VC DLLs and maybe MDAC as option) and
complete packages with options for the various subpackages +
the DLLs, EXEs, LIBs etc. they depend on.

Inno Setup should let me do both of these.
 
> (IMO creating an inno setup script would be very useful for
> py2exe, but this is probably a different issue...)

It's a different scope, but not unrelated ;-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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