[Pythonmac-SIG] .pydistutils.cfg (was: pychecker)

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 4-jan-05, at 14:51, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> On Jan 4, 2005, at 8:42 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> On Jan 4, 2005, at 8:09 AM, Jack Jansen wrote:
>>
>>> I'd never even heard of .pydistutils.cfg. I've added a note to the 
>>> FAQ pointing to it.
>>
>> It has some more features in Python 2.4, you can use it to add new 
>> build command packages to distutils out-of-tree (like py2app, 
>> bdist_mpkg, etc.).  Of course, very few distutils extensions are 
>> implemented in away that is compatible with this new feature, but 
>> it's there and I'll probably end up making py2app and bdist_mpkg 
>> compatible.
>>
>>> Then I looked at the distutils code, and noticed that there's also 
>>> an optional distutils.cfg inside the package. So that made me 
>>> wonder: we could install a symlink in 
>>> /System/yaddayaddayadda/lib/python2.3/distutils/distutils.cfg that 
>>> points to, say, /Library/Python/2.3/distutils.cfg, and put an 
>>> (admin-editable) file there that directs scripts tot the right place 
>>> system wide (/usr/local/bin by default, probably).
>>
>> +1 on the idea
>> +1 for /usr/local/bin as the "right place"

same here.

>>
>> Not so sure about install-data pointing to /usr/local/share (earlier 
>> on in the thread), because some packages might try and locate their 
>> data files using means other than distutils (sys.prefix relative).  I 
>> have never seen one of these packages, but god knows one has to 
>> exist.  In my experience, most packages seem to use install-data for 
>> documentation and maybe example code if anything.
>
> Another thing that would be nice is to have some admin-writable place 
> to put header files (in addition to Python's own headers) too.  But 
> that would require a patch to distutils and might need to happen in 
> the 2.5 tree.

install-headers in distutils.cfg + a patch to the Makefile should do 
it, e.g. set install-headers to /Library/Python/2.3/Headers and add 
'-I/Library/Python/2.3/Headers' to CPPFLAGS in config/Makefile.

Ronald