[Distutils] Installing scripts

[Stefan Seefeld]

Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:

> So how do you spell "I want the extension stripped from this one file on one 
> platform, and that's it."?  I'm also confused by your inclusion of "txt"; 
> does this apply to all file copies, just scripts, or some magically 
> determined set of file copies?
> 
> I think the answer is that we want something similar to the Extension class 
> for scripts, to give us a "bag" for script-specific options.  I don't see any 
> reason to extend extension-stripping beyond scripts.

[...]

> Additional keywords might be used to mark a script to be installed only on 
> certain platforms.  This could be used to install different scripts under the 
> same name on different platforms (for example, a Mac OS X-specific script on 
> Mac OS X, and a Tkinter script on Windows and other Unix systems).

The more I follow this thread the more I'm convinced that all this is
beyond what distutils should care about. After all, the setup.py files
are python scripts so users (packagers !) are able to put in additional
logic to deal with whatever they please.
Distutils already offers too much features, and instead of adding more
'default behavior' I would rather fix the existing features and make them
more consistent and intuitive.

Regards,
		Stefan

PS: More often than not I find that the distutils default behavior is way too
     restrictive, which is one more reason for me to believe that it would be
     better if distutils focussed on less but does that right, instead of wanting
     to please everybody.