[Distutils] Distutils changes - end user requirements

David Cournapeau david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Thu Apr 9 06:12:09 CEST 2009


Ben Finney wrote:
>
> I presume, by “meta-requirement”, you're showing awareness that this
> is something very much dependent on motivating people to actually
> create those installers for each and every package.
>   

Yes, and eggs decreases this motivation, as eggs are cross-platform (if
only python code of course), so people do not build .exe anymore. With a
wininst/msi-based installation, you get more features, which fit more
with what many windows users expect (software shown in install/remove
panel, can be removed). So those windows users have a worse install
experience than before eggs were widespread.

>
> Does “any machine” include those without MSI-creation tools? I imagine
> (but would love to know otherwise) that the creation of an MSI package
> cannot be done on any arbitrary Windows machine, but needs special
> (external to distutils) programs and/or libraries installed first.
>   

No, it doesn't need anything special, as it is included in python
(msilib is available at least in python >= 2.5 stdlib). Actually, you
can build almost any extension from wine as long as  mingw compilers are
an option, msi or wininst-based. Msi in particular have features that
eggs will most likely never be able to support well (group policy
support, which is something that some numpy/scipy users have regularly
requested).

cheers,

David



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