Distutils - can user designate install directory for windows installer?

[Timothy W. Grove]

Mark Hammond wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">On 
> 9/09/2009 1:57 AM, Timothy W. Grove wrote:
>> I have successfully built a windows installer for my python program
>> using distutils, (python setup.py bdist_wininst), but is there a way to
>> do it that will allow a user ('user' == 'boss', in this case!) to
>> designate the installation directory, rather than being forced to
>> install into /Python/Lib/site-packages ? Thanks for any help.
>
> bdist_wininst is for packaging python modules or packages and so 
> depends on Python itself being installed.  As a result, it only 
> installs into where Python libs and modules are generally installed.
>
> It sounds like you are looking for something to create a stand-alone 
> version of your program - in that case you are probably looking for 
> py2exe to create the application itself, and something like Inno or 
> NSYS to create an installer which allows the user to specify where 
> they want it installed and doesn't depend on Python already being 
> installed.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark
Your advice sounds like the direction I may have to go. It was just that 
when I run the distutils "installer", I'm presented with a setup dialog 
which shows the install directory  as /Python26 /site-packages/ in an 
uneditable text field. I thought that there might be an easy way to make 
that editable in order to change the path to a user defined directory, 
although I might also want to drop a .pth file into the site-packages 
directory so python knows where the application really is installed.

Thanks for your advice.

Best regards,
Tim
>
> </div>
>