[Distutils] Draft of new setuptools installation instructions

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:43 PM 10/3/2006 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>On 10/3/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>>Should we make more effort to create a usable command-line experience on
>>Windows?  Perhaps use a post-install script to register easy_install so it
>>works from "Start/Run", with an automatic pause to prevent the opened
>>console window from closing when it finishes running?  Should we include
>>optional registration for the ``.egg`` extension so downloading or
>>double-clicking an egg installs it?
>
>IMHO, no. Your particular suggestions would annoy me immensely,

Are you sure?  Two points here, that I think you're not noticing:

1. Registering an "App Paths" entry for easy_install would simply make it 
*possible* to type "easy_install" in the Start/Run box and have it 
work.  It wouldn't force you to use it, and seems quite unlikely to 
conflict with anything else.  (It could also be made optional, as per point 
#2.)

2. I said *optional* registration of the ``.egg`` extension; the idea would 
be that you'd have a dialog come up at the end of the .win32.exe run, to 
ask you if you wanted to add it.

So, unless you're saying that having the *options* to do these things would 
annoy you, I don't understand your statement.


>>* The new install procedure bypasses firewall issues for installing
>>setuptools itself, but doesn't do anything about the issue for packages
>>that have dependencies.  Is there anything else that can be done about that?
>
>I've not worked with enough such packages to know the answer to this
>without asking, but is there an incantation which says "check
>dependencies, if all are present install, otherwise list the missing
>dependencies and stop". If that's available, users can manually
>download what they need. That is minimal, but effective - in my view,
>simplicity is a virtue here.

Well, keep in mind that such a thing would only work for *one* level of 
dependencies; if your dependencies have dependencies you'll go through that 
repeatedly.

But I could perhaps add a --no-deps option to "install" that would do the 
trick.  easy_install already has a --no-deps option, but it currently 
doesn't *display* the dependency list; it probably should.  It also doesn't 
stop the installation process.

One minor issue: dependency checking currently takes place *after* the 
primary egg is installed, and changing that is too big a refactoring to 
happen in the remaining time until the 0.6 release.  But it's definitely 
something to think about for 0.7.