[Distutils] Installing scripts

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Thursday 01 July 2004 11:56 pm, Mark Hammond wrote:
 > I was replying to your original '--strip-extensions' idea, so it would
 > apply to whatever files you had in mind originally <wink>.

Ah; that was specific to scripts.  So let's not muck with the plain text 
files.  ;-)

 > It would seem more general to specify the full target name:

It's not clear how general we want it to be.  We basically want platform 
policy to decide; we want to provide hints.

 > scripts=[
 >    Script('bin/dostuff.py', platforms="windows"),
 >    Script('bin/dostuff.py', target="bin/dostuff", platforms="posix"),
 >
 > This doesn't handle a "default" platform though (ie, what would OSX do
 > given the above?)  Maybe we need "exclude_platforms" and
 > "include_platforms"?

Something like that; perhaps "platforms" and "except_platforms".

 > It is a real shame that setup.py has no foolproof access to the options
 > (such as the target platform) - then we could punt the problem right back
 > into setup.py - have it provide a different script list, possibly with
 > explicit target names, depending on the platform.

That's exactly what I *don't* want.  I want to be doing nothing conditional in 
the setup.py, since I really want to replace it all with metadata stored 
somewhere else, and have a minimum of code needed to load that metadata and 
pass it to distutils.core.setup().

 > I'm wondering how close we are getting to YAGNI though.

We're not there yet, I don't think.  Other than support for sbin directories, 
I want all this for Zope 3.  Support for installing scripts in $prefix/sbin 
has been requested on the list, and there's an RFE on SourceForge.  I don't 
think it's unreasonable.


  -Fred

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