[Distutils] Help making setuptools install more like plain distutils one

Christian Hudon chrish at apstat.com
Mon Apr 20 19:28:51 CEST 2009


Hello,

We have a setup where a central /usr/local is copied to all our 
machines. The packages installed in said central /usr/local are managed 
via stow. (Basically, each package is installed in a separate directory 
under /usr/local/stow, and invoking the stow command creates symlinks to 
make the package appear under /usr/local.)

This works very well for a wide range of packages: autoconf packages, 
CRAN packages for R, etc. This includes plain distutils python packages 
(install via "python setup.py install --prefix 
/usr/local/stow/some-package-name", then run stow). The only exception 
is setuptools-based python packages.

Is there a way to ask setuptools to do an install that looks more like a 
standard distutils install? I don't care if I lose some the advanced 
setuptools features. Basically, I need an install that's done via just 
copying new files. Problems like setuptoosl checking that the 
destination directory is in the PYTHONPATH I can work around (although 
if there's a switch to disable that check, I'd be happy to learn about 
it). The main problem is the file that's edited on each install to add a 
new line for each package install via setuptools. Is there a way with 
setuptools of getting just a directory tree (or a tarball, etc.) that 
either setuptools or myself can just copy somewhere to have an installed 
python module?

Thanks in advance for any help,

  Christian



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