[Python-Dev] [Distutils] How we can get rid of eggs for 2.6 and beyond

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 03:14:05PM +0100, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>>> Essentially, one would have to contribute patches to all the  
>>> distributions (we care about, at least), and then nag the respective
>>> maintainers to include these patches.
>>
>> Not true.  You just need to make sure that "setup.py install" creates
>> that database.  With the proposed format of the database this is just
>> a file in the correct location - exactly for this reason.  Next time
>> the distribution will build the package that database file will be in
>> place.
>
> How so? Are you /sure/ the packaging process even *runs* setup.py?
> And if they do, why do you think they will pick up the database
> file?

I speak for Debian, so for Debian: yes.  The setup.py would have to be
pretty bad for a packager to not use it.  There is no reason to
re-write upstream's installation procedure as you would have to figure
out which files need to be installed where and this would create many
bugs.

The canonical way is something like this:

  $ pythonX.Y setup.py --root=$(pwd)/debian/tmp
  $ # Fixup anything done wrong/badly (for debian) by setup.py
  $ # Make a tarball of $(pwd)/debian/tmp

In reality it's slightly more complicated of course.  At [1] there are
many packages, paste and parallelpython are good examples if you're
interested (look in the debian/rules file).


Regards
Floris

[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/python-modules/packages/?rev=0&sc=0

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