[Distutils] Best practices for creating eggs?

[Paul Moore]

On 6/29/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> Note that I said above that I always put the documentation in an sdist
> form;

Noted. The distinction I'm trying to make is that with bdist_wininst,
it's part of the binary installer - a single install gets the module
and its documentation, with no decisions needed by me.

I've no experience with other formats, so I'm afraid I can't compare
this with bdist_rpm, bdist_deb (spot-checking bdist_msi, it looks like
that packages the docs, as well). However, the package author clearly
got existing distutils mechanisms to include the docs,  so it's
possible.

I'm not trying to say this is a huge failing, just pointing out that
it's something that existing formats do, that eggs might be interested
in supporting.

> You can then decide what to do with any docs in it.

Having to make a decision at all rather than them "just being there"
is the (small) barrier I'm pointing out :-)

> A standard for how to install documentation would be great, because then
> you could run the docinstall command or whatever it's called on the source
> directory.  For that matter, easy_install could be made to do it also.

Agreed. But in the absence of a standard, supporting package authors'
existing approaches, which work with other distutils mechanisms, seems
like a reasonable requirement.

Paul.