[Distutils] Supporting extensibility in disutils

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Tuesday 03 August 2004 04:49 am, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
 > Nice, but does this actually implement what you had in mind ?

I think it does.

 > I don't see how the sysadmin could configure the system to
 > preset the commands package path. Hmm, he could probably do
 > so by tweaking the global distutils.cfg.

The sysadmin can tweak the global config file to affect all users.  Individual 
users can tweak their personal config file or a local config file (in the 
directory containing setup.py), or they can give the option from the command 
line only when they want it to take effect.

The tests make sure the option from the configuration file is handled 
correctly, though they only cover the local configuration file.  Mucking 
aruond with the per-installation and per-user files seemed dangerous, and 
changing the per-installation file could easily fail if Python is actually 
installed (due to lack of permissions).  In fact, the tests are somewhat 
fragile since they expect the per-installation and per-user files not to 
specify a value for this.  I'll fix this fragility in the patch today.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>