[Distutils] [Python Language Summit] Distutils / Packaging survey

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:05 PM, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 11:45 AM, David Cournapeau
>> <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>>
>>> It is a solved problem: autoconf does it well, and has all the required
>>> features,
>>>
>>
>> So does it mean that having Distutils generate some kind of
>> "configure.in" template that could
>> be used by autoconf could be the right approach ?
>>
>
> I meant that instead of installing almost everything indistinctly like
> we do now with distutils/setuptools, we should have something like:
>
> python setup.py install --bindir=foodir --sbindir=bardir --mandir=mandir
> ....

Sounds like new metadata to me, but besides the executable scripts location,
how would you deal with man file from the Python developer point of view ?

Man files seem rather specific to Linux, unless we have some kind of script
that would know how to transform a reStructuredText file into a man file ?

Would you like to write down a detailed description of these elements ?


>
> E.g. just copying the categories from autoconf (the ones which make
> sense for python packages). So making a FHS-compliant or something like
> currently done is the responsibility of the packagers -  assuming the
> directories are correctly set by the developer in the setup.py. The main
> problem is how to retrieve the different files when it is needed in the
> package - I would guess pkg_resources would need to be modified as well
> for that purpose,

Yes that was my example (the log file), and the feature needeed to have it
should be thaught and implemented on its own, because setuptools's
pkg_resources
does myriad of things.

Would you like to write down a detail description of that feature as well ?

We could add this feature as a possible enhancement in Distutils, in
the Survey I am building.

Regards
Tarek