[Distutils] An idea on the creation of binary installers

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Jack Jansen wrote:
> I have a vague idea a new bdist format that I'd like to bounce off you 
> all before I start thinking about it too hard. In other words, please 
> shoot holes in it.
> 
> The bdist_dumb formats have exactly that problem: they're too dumb. They 
> basically create a tarfile (or other archive type) with full pathnames 
> in it and that's it. However, there could be a bdist_xxx which would 
> create a tarfile in which everything was relative, but the directory 
> parts are magic. If you extract this tarfile with a normal tar you would 
> get a directory with under it directories INSTALL_BASE, 
> INSTALL_PLATBASE, ROOT, etc etc etc. Or maybe all these would be rooted 
> in a xxx/platform.machine.version directory, probably a better idea. The 
> tar file would also contain the setup.py script.
> 
> The next part of the idea is that distutils would also learn about an 
> install_xxx command. The default version of this command would simply 
> copy the relevant files from xxx/platform.machine.version to their 
> required locations, but it could of course be customized by the author 
> of the setup script.
> 
> The final part of the idea is that "install" gets a bit of magic so it 
> notices it is being run from an xxx installation directory. In this case 
> it doesn't go through the build/install sequence, but quickly calls 
> install_xxx. I'm not sure about the magic needed, it could test for the 
> current directory only containing setup.py and xxx (and maybe a couple 
> of files like README and such), it could test for missing source files, 
> I'm not really sure. And maybe this whole bit of magic isn't needed, and 
> the end user will just have to learn to type "install_xxx", if we find a 
> good enough name for xxx.

xxx = prebuilt ?! After all, that what this seems to be about :-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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