[Distutils] Killing off bdist_dumb

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Andrew MacIntyre wrote:
>>Andrew, was the use of full paths the problem that kept you 
>>from using it?
> 
> 
> After revisiting some experiments, I can say that full paths was the 
> issue that kept me from using it.
> 
> While I note MAL's point about sub-classing, that is only useful from 
> the POV of a module author.

You probably mean "packager". The developer isn't necessarily
the same person, e.g. a user might want to build from source
then redistribute a package in some other way.

> My POV is that of a 3rd party who wants to build & distribute installable 
> module binaries to accompany a non-PythonLabs Python binary distribution.
> 
>>From this POV, on the particular platform I'm supporting, what I want is 
> bdist_dumb to default to using paths relative to sys.prefix.

Please don't change defaults: this only introduces hassles for
packagers since they'll have to add multi-version support to
their setup.py which only complicates the process.

If you want to add new functionality, provide a command option
and then use that in your code. If you want to use this as default,
place the option into the setup.cfg file.

> I tried to suss out what changes might achieve this, and the simplest 
> option that occurred to me was to move down the extra directory levels 
> when changing directory into the "dumb" directory prior to zipping 
> things up.  This is not too bad for OS/2, where the installation 
> structure has always been simple & consistent across releases, but 
> other platforms are more involved.
> 
> A bdist_dumb option to select between full & relative paths would be 
> Ok.

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