[Distutils] Improving distutils' script and GUI app handling

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sat Sep 24 02:13:34 CEST 2005


At 03:45 PM 9/23/2005 -0700, Trent Mick wrote:
> > > > Where does setuptools install its wrapper executables? (The
> > > > usual \Python24\Scripts directory isn't added to PATH by the
> > > > installer).
> > >
> > >setuptools installs them in PythonXY\Scripts.
> >
> > Unless you set --install-scripts somewhere else, which you can do in a
> > configuration file.  To the greatest extent possible, I'm trying to have
> > setuptools minimize surprises with respect to installation locations, by
> > conforming to the active distutils configuration.
>
>Does anybody else think that installing to PythonXY\Scripts (instead of
>to PythonXY) is broken?

Windows doesn't really have any obvious standard place to put this sort of 
thing, unless you consider the Windows\Command directory.


>  With Perl and Ruby, for example, scripts from a
>3rd party package will be installed next to the main interpreter binary
>(i.e. on the PATH) on all platforms. Would having setuptools (and
>changing distutils) to install scripts next to python.exe wreak
>unwarranted havoc?

Sadly, yes.  First of all, python.exe isn't *on* the PATH on Windows unless 
you put it there yourself.  Second, the python.exe directory is on 
sys.path, so it would turn your scripts into modules, conflicting with any 
same-named modules.

So, yes, I'm afraid "havoc" is the correct word, though it would certainly 
be nice if someone would step up and prove me wrong here.



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