[Distutils] setuptools: mishandles install of non-python scripts

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:52 PM 6/12/2006 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>At 05:22 PM 6/9/2006 -0700, Ned Deily wrote:
> >In build_scripts.py in distutils.command, distuitils uses the results of
> >first_line_re to decide whether to adjust the python value in the shbang
> >line of the script: if no "python" is found, distutils installs the
> >script without modification.  easy_install.py uses the first_line_re
> >test from distutils but seems to unconditionally add a wrapper to the
> >script during installation regardless of the script's type.
>
>Who needs shell scripts when you have Python?  ;)
>
>I can (sort of) fix this, but there are some potentially-significant
>limitations.

There's another wrinkle, as it turns out.  It's not sufficient to inspect 
the first line for a #!python presence - it's perfectly valid and possible 
to have .py or .pyw scripts that don't have a #! line, especially on 
Windows.  So, the actual condition to test if the program is a Python 
script should be to compile it.  If it's valid Python syntax, easy_install 
will assume it's a Python script, rather than a shell, batch, or other kind 
of script file.

But, it's *also* necessary to check whether there is a *non*-Python #! 
line, if the first line begins with #!.  It's quite possible for a shell 
script to be syntactically valid Python, especially if you have a shell 
prolog hidden in what looks like a Python docstring.  This is a trick that 
I believe is listed in the Python FAQ, although I don't know if it's used 
in any currently-distributed scripts.  But it should be supported.

So the full rules for analyzing scripts should be:

* If there's a #! line, use first_line_re to tell if it's Python
* If there's a '.py' or '.pyw' extension, assume it's Python
* Otherwise, try to compile the script.  If it compiles, assume it's Python
* Otherwise, assume it's not.

There is one possiblity I'm leaving out here, which is that you have some 
other script interpreter (e.g. .bat or .cmd files on Windows) that just 
magically happen to be syntactically-valid Python.  In the .bat/.cmd case, 
anything more complex than a series of one-word commands with no arguments 
would fail to be valid Python, so it seems incredibly unlikely that this 
would ever happen.

Actually, there's one other possibility I'm also leaving out, which is that 
you have a .bat or .cmd or some other script whose first line uses -x to 
skip that line.  In such a case, lines 2-N of the file are valid Python, 
but line 1 doesn't start with #!.  In theory, what this should do is keep 
the first line and wrap the rest.  However, such scripts aren't supported 
by the distutils, so I'm not going to add them to setuptools for 0.6.