[Distutils] How can I create prebuilt distributions?

[Jack Jansen]

On vrijdag, feb 14, 2003, at 18:00 Europe/Amsterdam, David Ascher wrote:

> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>
>> This is basically what ActiveState does with their .ppm format:
>> they ship a tarred build directory and then run something like
>> "python setup.py install" on the target machine.
>
> Right.  There were quite a few problems with that -- many of the 
> setup.py's for example could only work with the full source 
> distribution, etc. etc.

I've already given up on the idea, mainly for this reason. Plus, I want 
a solution that doesn't need modification of the setup.py script. For 
the immediate future I'm sticking with bdist-dumb distributions, and on 
the receiving system I can do one of three things:
1. Just unpack it and hope for the best:-)
2. Check the common prefix of the files in the distro (unfortunately 
filenames seem to have both ./usr/local/... and usr/local form) and 
check that that matches sys.prefix.
3. In the distribution database record the prefix used to create the 
archive, and when unpacking the files substitute sys.prefix for 
recorded prefix.

At the moment I do (1), but I plan to switch to 2 or 3 shortly 
(hopefully before 2.3a2).

It would be nice if at some point in the future the two phases of 
distutils (build and install) could be cleanly separated. The files are 
mostly separated (although I think that things like scripts and 
datafiles don't go via the build subtree, but are installed straight 
from the source, right?), but there should be a way in which distutils 
could skip the build steps. Although some stuff from the build may need 
to be executed, I've seen setup scripts where install actually looks 
inside the build object to obtain data...
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -