[Distutils] Extending distutils with 3rd party build commands?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:09 AM 10/21/04 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>On Oct 20, 2004, at 18:38, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>
>>>On Oct 20, 2004, at 18:10, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>>
>>>>Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I've developed two bdist commands (bdist_pkg and bdist_mpkg) for usage 
>>>>>on OS X.  These commands apply to any setup.py that supports an 
>>>>>"install" command, similar to bdist_wininst, so it would be nice if 
>>>>>every setup.py didn't have to explicitly import something in order to 
>>>>>get the commands there.
>>>>>I know I can make it work with a pth file that imports bdist_pkg, but 
>>>>>that seems a bit costly to do because it will end up importing a bunch 
>>>>>of stuff (distutils, mainly).
>>>>>Is there another way to do it?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Submit them for inclusion in the standard distribution ;-)
>>>
>>>
>>>I will, for 2.5... but there's quite some time between now and then.
>>
>>Well I did find another way, thanks to PEP 302.
>>How "evil" would it be if I had this module imported by a pth file?  It 
>>does do what I want it to do, but I'm not sure if it's safe to inflict on 
>>users or not..
>
>Import hooks are bad. Avoid them if you can.
>
>What so bad in adding a sinlge import to all your setup.pys ?
>That import could then trigger the installation of the new
>command by importing distutils and tweaking the cmdclass
>in distutils, e.g.
>
>import biDistutilsExtensions

Another possibility: create a script that does the import, then calls 
execfile() on 'setup.py' in the current directory, so that you can just run 
that script instead of setup.py.  You can then install that script, so 
users can run it against any setup.py.