[Distutils] New bdist_wininst

[Greg Ward]

On 28 August 2000, Thomas Heller said:
> My fault. I created the zip-file with WinZip by zipping the whole distutils
> source tree, and then deleted everything not related to bdist_wininst.
> Didn't know (and winzip didn't show it) that all this crap was still
> included.

Damn GUIs.  I mean, a visual representation of what's in your computer
is very nice, but only if it really is a complete representation!

> BTW, what do you think of the changes I made, especially this one:
>   - The target-compile and target-optimize flags of bdist_wininst
>     are gone. It is no longer possible to compile the python
>     files during installation. 

I assume "installation" here means "final installation on the target
host", in which case this seems fine to me.  If this means that the
Windows installer will now be roughly as big as the RPM, because it
includes bytecode files, that doesn't bother me too much.  Not as much
as the "what could go wrong?" aspect to byte-compiling everything on the
end-user's machine.

...hmmm, I just whipped up a wininst installer of the current code, and
it doesn't have .pyc files in it.  I don't see an option to compile at
pseudo-install time, either.  Are you just assuming that the normal
compile-on-demand approach will work on the target machine?  I thought
NT had sensible permissions, so that ordinary users couldn't necessarily
write to a "system" directory... is Python normally installed so that
ordinary users can write to its library directory?

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - Unix geek                                   gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
Think honk if you're a telepath.