[Distutils] bdist_wininstall and --quiet

[Thomas Heller]

"Ehle, Brandon" <BEhle at ea.com> writes:

> I'm trying to create a setup programming that deploys python plus all
> the required extensions packages.  Rather than have person who is
> installing click next four gazillion times, I'd like for the extension
> module packages to run in a quiet mode where it starts up, shows the
> install process and then exits without any user intervention (short of
> fatal errors).  For most of the extensions I need to install, this seems
> to work ok (they are installing via InnoSetup and -veryquiet), but any
> packages that were released with bdist_wininst do not seem to support
> this feature.
>
> Is this a feature that could be added to future releases of distutils?
> The RPM packages install in a non-interactive mode so I believe it would
> make sense to offer this same functionality on windows.

Sure it could ;-), but it requires major restructuring of the
bdist_wininst C code.

> Obviously any old bdist_wininst packages aren't going to have this
> functionality yet.  Is there some trick that I might be able to get this
> to work with any current bdist_wininst packages?

I see at least two possibilities:

1. Install Python and all packages you want to distribute on some
machine, and repackage all of this in a new installer (inno, wise, nsis,
whatever) and distribute that. IMO this is basically what ActiveState does.

2. bdist_wininst installers are zipfiles whith a small executable stub.
You could write a Python script which opens the installer with
zipfile.ZipFile, and do the unpacking and installation yourself. Should
be a matter of one or two hours.

Regards,

Thomas