[Distutils] some installer grumbles

[Mats Wichmann]

I did something silly the other day in with PyXML, and ended
up motivated to post a bugreport on the result.  The developers
kicked that back with the observation that it's a distutils
issue.  Sad to say, I've been on this list for a while but
too busy to pay any real attention, these are probably old
and thoroughly hashed-out issues, but I thought I'd toss this
out here for comment before doing anything else with it:

====================

This is the result of operator error, but nonetheless...
I accidentally launched an install of PyXML on a w2k system where
it was already installed.  I know the instructions say to remove
old installations first (actually it wasn't an "old" installation,
it was the same version, to be really nitpicky) as I said,
Operator Error.  However, at  this point:

(a) the existing installation is not detected with a
bailout option ("blah blah already installed blah blah
do you want to continue?")

(b) there's no way to abort the installation once it starts
(no cancel button)

(c) you are prompted for EACH file as to whether to
replace or not; there is no "yes to all" (or "no to all") so one
would potentially have to click "yes" or "no" hundreds of
times to complete for something like PyXML.

==================

A little further comment:

I ended up doing the NT/2000 equivalent of ps and kill: I
brought up the task manager and blew the whole thing away.

Needless to say, I don't think this is ideal or I wouldn't
have gone to the effort of grumbling about it.

==================

Here was the response to the report:

The windows installer is created using the distutils
bdist_wininst command. That means that we cannot easily
change the user interface of the installation procedure.
Please report this as a distutils bug in the Python project.

==================

Any comments?

Mats