[Distutils] Installing large applications

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Tuesday 15 June 2004 09:02 am, Flavio Codeco Coelho wrote:
 > I would hope the installation procedure would keep all the files under a
 > folder in site-packages named after the application name, which is given
 > in the setup.py. That would make is easier to manually remove an
 > application if necessary

If you make you application a script plus a Pyhon package, you'll get 
something closer to what you're asking for.  I've also merged in Phillip 
Eby's package_data support for Python 2.4; this makes it easy to have data 
installed into your package directly.  Your setup.py could be simply:

-------------------------------------------------------
from distutils.core import setup

setup(...,
      packages=['mypackage'],
      package_data={'mypackage': ['mypackage/*.dat']},
      scripts=['myscript.py'],
      )
-------------------------------------------------------

This would cause the installation to be the script itself (still in 
/usr/bin/), and a directory containing the Python package "mypackage" 
(/usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages/mypackage/).

The package_data support will be available in Python 2.4, or you can use 
Phillip's "setuptools" package.  For more information about setuptools, see

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/python/python/nondist/sandbox/setuptools/

We've been using setuptools effectively for Zope X3, and have been pleased 
with it.  (We've only been using the package_data functionality, however.)

 > (I reckon distutils does not support unistalls?
 > please correct me if I am wrong).

Distutils is likely to grow an uninstaller at some point, once the 
installation / package database is implemented.  I'm not sure of the status 
of that effort at this time, though I'd like to see it move forward.  I know 
Andrew Kuchling has worked on this and has invited others to participate, but 
I'm sorry to say I've lacked the time.

 > Maybe my frustrations are due to my lack of knowledge of distutils, but
 > the documentation available does not help a lot.

No, the documentation doesn't help much.  If you can offer *specific* 
suggestions, preferrably in the form of bug reports (so they don't get lost), 
I'll do what I can to improve the docs.


  -Fred

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