[Distutils] [Python-Dev] distlib updated with resources API

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2. Some level of standardised functionality for building and
>> installing. By "standardised", I mean that given *any* sdist, no
>> matter what build tool it uses under the scenes, there is a way of
>> saying "build this, and put the output into the following
>> directories". For distutils, this is --install-XXX. Distribute
>> complicates this by changing the meaning of these options (you need
>> --single-version-externally-managed and --record) but otherwise
>> follows the standard. Add an API to wrap this (include autodetection
>> of setuptools/distribute, and hooks for other tools to integrate in,
>> and you're done). A wrapper like this might be a good thing to have in
>> distlib.
>
> Note that one of the core goals of wheel is to finally break the
> distutils conflation of "build" and "install". They're different
> things, but the lack of a platform-neutral binary format has meant
> that they've largely been conflated in practice for Python
> distribution. Any new build hook should be as hands off as possible
> and have a wheel (or a wheel-format directory) as the result, which is
> then installed according to the normal rules.
>
>> 5. Conversion tools to build things like RPMs or MSIs from a wheel
>> would likely be the best way to integrate platform-format installers.
>
> I actually need to be able to generate an SRPM from an sdist, as SRPM
> -> RPM is the only build system Koji understands. However, the
> advantage of wheel is that it should be possible to automatically
> generate a SPEC file which is actually half decent (by running the
> build hook and introspecting the resulting wheel).

Note that the build manifest concept as used in bento (and used by
wheel as well I believe) is designed specifically to allow conversion
between binary formats (where it makes sense of course). It is still
in flux, but I could convert eggs to windows installers,

David