[Python-Dev] Killing off bdist_dumb

[A.M.Kuchling]

On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 05:24 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Why do you want to lose bdist_dumb?

Bug #410541 is that the .zip archive created by bdist_dumb is useless
because it contains filenames relative to the root directory.  Because 
Python can
be installed anywhere on Windows, the .zip files are therefore useless
for Windows installation.  They might be usable on Unix platforms, as 
long as
you're sure about whether Python is in /usr/ or /usr/local, and if 
tying it to a
single version is OK (because the path will be 
/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages).

This could be fixed by making it possible to use relative paths, of 
course,
so you'd have to unpack the resulting .zip in site-packages, but if no 
one uses .zip files for this purpose, why bother?

If bdist_wininst wasn't around, then bdist_dumb would be the only way 
to install on Windows, and clearly this would have to fixed.  With 
bdist_wininst,
I don't know if anyone cares.  On Unix bdist_dumb also doesn't handle 
scripts, apparently.

Andrew MacIntyre's use of .zip files on OS/2 may save bdist_dumb, 
though.
Andrew, was the use of full paths the problem that kept you from using 
it?

The options are:
   1) leave it as-is, broken and useless.  (The current state; this 
seems pointless.)
   2) fix it
   3) rip it out

--amk