[Distutils] Distutils windows binaries...

[Thomas Heller]

"Phil Hornby" <phil.hornby at accutest.co.uk> writes:

> Okay, I love what I can do with distutils in windows - i.e. create a binary
> distribution of a module/package/etc
>
> But I have a few questions:
>
> If I write a script to generate all the details of the distribution - files
> list, etc - how do I force the script to make it into a binary distro? Do I
> modify the arguement list passed to the script to 'fake' that it was called
> with this? Cos I may well just want to run a script and have that as default
> behaviour.
>
> I have seen that there is the facility to build extension modules into the
> distro by actually building them from source - is it recommended to do it
> this way - what about including pre-built extensions? I have tried adding
> them to the 'data_files' option and it seems to work - although by default
> they don't end up where I would expect. Has anyone else played with that?

You can customize distutils to do *anything* you want by subclassing.
The basic functionality, however, assumes you are distributing python
modules, scripts, and extensions.  And distutils actually is the easiest
way imo to also *build* the extensions.

IIRC, you can also use the borland compiler to build the extensions -
see the output of 'python setup.py build_ext --help-compiler'.

>
> I know you can change the bitmap displayed during the install but can you
> change the icon that is displayed for the *.exe that is generated?

You can change the icon of the
Lib/site-packages/distutils/command/wininst.exe with any tool of your
choice, *before* building the installer.

Thomas