[Distutils] Self-contained boostrap scripts [was: Re: A new, experimental packaging tool: distil]

[Vinay Sajip]

> From: Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>

>
> Yes, my point was that Vinay's usage could be covered by distributing
> distil as a zip file. All it is doing is decoding it's blob of data
> (which is an encoded zip file) and then adding the resulting zip to
> sys.path.
[snip]
> I hope that "embedded binary blobs" does not become a common approach.
> I'd much rather that "runnable zip files" became the norm. 

I don't know if it's that important to distinguish between the two. I found the approach I'm using with distil to be a tad more flexible in my case. A runnable zip has the advantage that it's harder to tinker with, but with the way distil.py is at the moment, you can tweak e.g. its logging just by changing distil.py. (At some point soon it will have an optional configuration file to control some aspects of its behaviour, but that's by the by.) It also does a bit of processing to process -e and -p and relaunches with a new Python interpreter if needed - developing this logic was quicker because I didn't have to add my changes to the .zip each time I tweaked something.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip