[Python-Dev] magic in setuptools (Was: setuptools in the stdlib)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:19 PM 4/23/2006 +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
>On Sunday 23 April 2006 11:43, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > Maybe we need something that's the equivalent of alien (rpm -> dpkg
> > converter), so that given an egg, one can easily get a native
> > installer for that egg.
>
>An 'eggconvert' that used the existing bdist_foo machinery to build
>system specific packages would probably be an ok summer of code
>project, no?

That's probably not going to be the best way to get from an egg to a system 
package, since a lot of the bdist_foo commands try to build things from 
source, and an egg for the specific platform is already going to be built, 
and won't include source (except for Python modules).

Probably you'd want to create something more like Vincenzo Di Massa's 
"easy_deb" program, which uses easy_install to find and fetch a source 
distribution, then builds a .deb from it.  You can currently use:

    easy_install --editable --build_directory=somewhere SomePackage

And it will find SomePackage, and unpack a source distribution into 
'somewhere/somepackage'.  So you could then change to that directory and 
run the package's setup.py with any bdist command you wanted to.

So, for any bdist_foo command that's already implemented in the distutils, 
you can already get pretty close to this functionality by using a short 
shell script that just calls easy_install followed by the setup.py.

What you won't get without writing some more code is dependency 
support.  You also have to deal with the issue of mapping PyPI names to the 
names used by the relevant packaging system.