[Distutils] Odd limitation in packaging/distutils2

[Éric Araujo]

Hi,

Le 04/11/2011 13:11, Mark Hammond a écrit :
> On 4/11/2011 3:53 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
>> Agreed, it's not good. It's just that I don't know (on Windows) what
>> things *do* make a Python build "installed". I'll see if I can find a
>> definitive statement from somewhere...
> 
> There really isn't anything that makes it "installed".  A built Python 
> works completely fine just where it is (and indeed, will work just fine 
> if moved somewhere else).  The closest thing to being "installed" on 
> windows is an "InstalledPath" (or something :) registry key for the 
> version, but that is only necessary in a limited number of contexts - 
> when some executable other than the in-place python[w].exe needs to know 
> where things are.

Ah, okay.  The situation is different on UNIX: Installing Python
typically writes the file in read-only mode (one consequence: users have
to call setup.py --user, use virtualenv or switch to the superuser to
install things), and does not just copy the build dir (so missing data
files in the Makefile cause bugs that can only be seen when running the
test suite or other code from an installed Python).

> I think the original report is certainly a bug on Windows (and seems 
> mis-guided on other platforms, but each to their own :)

I’ve already said that I want to remove the limitation for all OSes :)

Cheers