[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

Kaelin Colclasure kaelin at acm.org
Sat Nov 7 17:42:29 CET 2009


On Nov 7, 2009, at 12:39 AM, Lennart Regebro wrote:

> 2009/11/7 Kaelin Colclasure <kaelin at acm.org>:
>> Since I bootstrapped the environment I used to learn Python with
>> easy_install, I naturally went straight to the easy_install docs to  
>> learn
>> how to give back. I wasn't even aware of this separate thing called
>> distutils until I read about it in the easy_install (err setuptools)
>> documentation (sic).
>
> Yes, this seems to be a reasonably way to realize that packaging is
> done with distutils. What was then complicated with the distutils
> docs? It's so long ago I did this the first time I don't remember if I
> found it difficult.


The setuptools docs I read left me with the impression that distutils  
was more about building C extensions and that if my package was pure  
Python source (which it was) I should not need anything more than  
setuptools. And this did prove true, eventually -- but only after I  
restructured my source into a package to be more like setuptools  
wanted it.

What wasted quite a bit of time along the way was that I found other  
examples of setup.py files that were using setuptools but were also  
using some underlying distutils conventions for packaging a single  
module. This approach wasn't mentioned in the setuptools docs but it  
*looked* more like what I was trying to do. But then, it turned out  
there was no simple way to use the single-module spec *and* get my  
static data installed along with the code.

HTH,

-- Kaelin


>
> -- 
> Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
> http://regebro.wordpress.com/
> +33 661 58 14 64



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