[Distutils] Draft of new setuptools installation instructions

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:48 AM 10/4/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>I'm working on new installation instructions for setuptools 0.6c4, which 
>>will no longer use ez_setup.py for end-user manual installation of 
>>setuptools (as opposed to bundled installation with another package).
>
>This seems to me to be a pretty huge change for a c4 release.
>Why not get 0.6 final out and do this for 0.7?

Because I want 0.6 to be very stable; 0.7 may be a long time coming.  The 
idea is to start making setuptools into *infrastructure*: something you 
just install like Python, not something that you need an automatic updater 
for.  :)


>>I'm looking for any feedback people might have, on the installation 
>>process itself or on the directions.  Some particular areas of 
>>question/concern:
>>* Should ez_setup perhaps launch a web browser pointing to these 
>>instructions, instead of trying to download setuptools itself?  (This 
>>would bypass most of those annoying proxy problems right off the bat, at 
>>least when just installing setuptools.)
>
>Would it be possible, instead to provide a proxy option to 
>easy_install/ez_setup
>(and the underlying setptools apis)?

The HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy environment variable controls proxying for 
Python programs, including easy_install and ez_setup.py.  What doesn't work 
is if they require NTLM authentication, which is not built into urllib.  As 
long as the information is available in the Windows registry or 
environment, and NTLM auth isn't needed, it should work.  But when NTLM 
auth is required, easy_install isn't going to work unless you use a proxy 
program like the one at http://ntlmaps.sf.net/


>>* 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?
>
>Yes, provide a proxy option, ideally one that can be read from
>a configuration file.

That's probably not a bad idea, since it would be more discoverable than 
the environment variable and registry stuff.  However, I'll have to tone up 
my urllib-fu in order to do that, as I have no idea how to set the proxy 
information from *code* (as opposed to the environment).  It also won't 
help with ez_setup.py, which doesn't have any configuration file abilities 
or command-line option parsing of its own, although I could perhaps add the 
necessary arguments to the ez_setup API, since it's going away as a 
command-line tool anyway.