[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions for Python 3.3

[Jeremy Kloth]

On Thursday, October 13, 2011 01:42:13 PM Paul Moore wrote:
> Maybe the wininst and MSI installers should ultimately become simple
> UIs around a zipfile and an invocation of the packaging APIs? Not that
> I'm offering to do that work, I'm afraid...

The bdist_wininst/_msi installers cannot use any of the packaging.* code 
*runtime* as packaging (or distutils2) isn't necessarily installed on the 
target machine.  I would think that having it as a prerequisite to actually 
running the installers is a bad thing.  Including the required support files 
within the installers may be doable but could add too much complexity and 
possibly lead to stale code issues (for the support files).

That said, I have been working on a drop-in replacement for the current 
bdist_wininst executable stub with the following features:
- install to 32- or 64-bit Python installations from a single installer;
  currently one installer for each architechure is required
- install to any Python from version 2.4 to the latest;
  currently one installer is needed for each major version
- updated look and feel (Wizard97) with the new (as of Python 2.5!) logo;
  for some screen shots see: 
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/67460826@N04/sets/72157627653603530/
- unicode metadata support (name, summary, description)
- runs on Win95 through Win7 (that is, all support platforms for the supported 
Python versions for packaging)
- per-user installs (as in, setup.py install --user);
  currently only system-wide or per-user based on permissions and how Python 
itself was installed

Planned Features:
- multi-version extension module support; one installer that can install the 
precompiled extensions to different Python versions
- prefix installs (as in, setup.py install --prefix) for virtual environments 
or other non-standard locations.  Current thinking is to *not* track these 
installations in the Add/Remove programs.

-- 
Jeremy Kloth