[Distutils] install --dry-run broken?

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 6:58 AM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> 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.)

Right, I think sandboxing would be a better solution, less intrusive
to the code,
and this would work for *any* distutils command out there.

Now my question is about setuptools' sandbox :  it seems to me that it was only
making sure a setup script wasn't trynig to write outside a given
directory, using DirectorySandbox.

1- How this tool could be used to record the writings ? Would we need
to subtype AbstractSandbox ?
2- If  1/ is doable, what about making this tool its own standalone
project ? that would be useful for many projects

Regards
Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org