[Distutils] install --dry-run broken?

[P.J. Eby]

At 05:11 PM 4/22/2010 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>Or maybe this constitutes "working" for distutils. ;)

It does, I'm afraid.  The problem is that the build is also a dry 
run, so the files aren't there for the later bits to actually copy.

It might be better to do a dry run mechanism based mainly on 
setuptools' sandboxing code -- the sandbox framework could be 
extended to allow faking all file operations that go through normal 
Python APIs.  (i.e. not external commands like compilers; those would 
of course fail unless separately faked.)

There are actually quite a lot of applications for such sandboxing 
within the distutils, that at one time I hoped to explore in later 
setuptools versions.  (e.g. for testing, uninstalls of arbitrary 
packages, etc.)