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

[Ian Bicking]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:05 AM, David Cournapeau <
david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:

> 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
> ....
>
> 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,
>

In the previous discussion (somewhere, I'm too lazy to look it up) people
started getting interested in the idea of an improved sdist format.  I think
the basic idea was to tag files by type.  Then (I guess) you'd just do:

  python setup.py build

to get the platform-specific parts of the library built, and then move the
files into place based on the descriptions of the files.  The actual tool to
do this would be external to setup.py and distutils; e.g., you'd have a
python-sdist-to-rpm tool, developed entirely separately from distutils or
setuptools.  Potentially this would make it easier to provide your own file
tags, so you could adapt a library without requiring immediate upstream
support or patches.

As you mention, there would have to be some extension to pkg_resources (or
an equivalent library) to handle finding these files at runtime.  Getting a
runtime in place is probably the harder thing, as it is more intrusive for
the upstream developers.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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