[Distutils] EasyInstall: scripts

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:56 PM 5/29/2005 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I'm wondering how scripts should be handled by easyinstall -- right now
>they pretty much get ignored.  But I'm not sure how they should be
>handled at all.  Distutils has a couple rules, with --install-scripts,
>and --home (which uses ~/bin), and the normal rules... and then some
>translation of those options to Windows.  But none of those seems to
>translate very well to easyinstall.  Or eggs.
>
>I don't have any ideas myself on this.  Except that the scripts
>themselves are usually pretty dumb anyway, just thin wrappers that fix
>up sys.path, import a module, and call a function; so the status quo
>could probably be improved upon anyway.

Yep.  Like you, however, I'm not sure what to do about 'em.  Take a look at 
the Unix versions of easy_install -- they're actually the regular .egg 
files, with a shell script cat'ted on at the front!  (Somebody could 
probably pull the same trick with an .exe on Windows.)

However, such "eggsecutables" aren't really a solution for packages with 
multiple scripts.  I'm thinking maybe bdist_egg should include an 
EGG-SCRIPTS directory for the scripts, so that EasyInstall could pull them 
out and install them whenever you do a non --multi-version install.  It 
would, however, also need to *uninstall* them when deactivating a current 
version, because otherwise they'd be for the wrong version.

I had previously thought that we would move towards using "python -m" to 
run scripts in eggs; unfortunately this only works for unpacked eggs, not 
egg files.

Of course, this all just overlaps the fact that distutils script 
installation is really only good for command-line utilities anyway, and 
even for those, Windows requires a fair bit of tweaking in order to be able 
to use them effectively at a non-Cygwin command line.

It might help if there were some kind of metadata for scripts, like to 
indicate whether something is a command-line utility, a graphical 
application, etc.  Then distutils could tweak the file extension and/or 
build a custom launcher for it (like Fredrik Lundh's exemaker for Windows) 
as appropriate for the platform.  That information could then be added to 
EGG-INFO and/or EGG-SCRIPTS, and used by EasyInstall to do script 
installation and uninstallation.