[Distutils] EasyInstall: installing non-distutil packages
Phillip J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Mon May 30 08:33:46 CEST 2005
At 12:20 AM 5/30/2005 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I'm thinking maybe a better way to do this would be some sort of patch
>process, so that I could distribute a setup.py seperately, or some other
>custom build process, that easy_install could detect and run.
>
>And, of course, obviously I *could* fix these upstream, but I think this
>is a useful problem to solve through easy_install, even if these
>particular packages get fixed later.
Yes, I've kind of thought about doing that (patches, or special
modes/options/whatever), but it seemed just a bit Microsofty, if you know
what I mean. :)
On the other hand, Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility has
been legendary, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to emulate. It should
help us achieve Total World Domination more quickly, which is why I was
willing to put in the research time to figure out how to do sandboxing.
So, I guess there are two ends of the "backward compatibility" spectrum here:
* Low-end: Single .py files and other setup-free distributions
* High-end: Distributions that muck about with their installation paths in
one way or another
I've so far found that there are almost as many ways to hack package data
paths as there are packages; through considerable tweaking I've managed to
get bdist_egg now to handle more packages without virtualization, but it's
a regression-testing nightmare, because all the stuff is order sensitive,
and stuff that looks unnecessary is in fact necessary to support different
packages' ways of getting at the same information.
I think, however, that all of those kludges will have to stick around until
Python 2.6, using the Python 2.5 timeframe to warn that 'data_files' should
not be used to install data into site-packages, and that 'package_data' is
the correct approach.
As for me, at the moment I've successfully gotten aquarium, IPython, and
numarray to install their data only into their eggs, without any
virtualization. So I'll be checking those kludges in momentarily.
I have to say that in hindsight, the absence of adequate support for
package-data installation in previous versions of the distutils was perhaps
its single largest flaw. It appears very rare that anybody ever creates
custom distutils commands, unless they needed to in order to work around
that problem. As a consequence, it makes it much harder to get bdist_egg
to trap such installs and route them to the right place.
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