[Python-Dev] [Distutils] How we can get rid of eggs for 2.6 and beyond

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 04:42:36PM +0100, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>> I speak for Debian, so for Debian: yes.  The setup.py would have to be
>> pretty bad for a packager to not use it.  There is no reason to
>> re-write upstream's installation procedure as you would have to figure
>> out which files need to be installed where and this would create many
>> bugs.
>>
>> The canonical way is something like this:
>>
>>   $ pythonX.Y setup.py --root=$(pwd)/debian/tmp
>>   $ # Fixup anything done wrong/badly (for debian) by setup.py
>>   $ # Make a tarball of $(pwd)/debian/tmp
>>
>> In reality it's slightly more complicated of course.
>
> More than slightly so, with pycentral, pysupport, and all that.
>
> I still doubt that the database would show up in a directory on
> sys.path.

If not it would be a bug in pycentral/pysupport.  Only two bugs to
file, not that bad I think!

>> At [1] there are
>> many packages, paste and parallelpython are good examples if you're
>> interested (look in the debian/rules file).
>
> I started with nevow. It uses cdbs, so its debian/rules is nearly
> empty, and does not include a call to setup.py at all.
>
> Instead, the distutils support is in
>
> /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/python-distutils.mk
[...]

Again, that would be a bug in CDBS.

For the specific snippet you showed, yes that does essentially
"pythonX.Y setup.py --root=$some_alternate_root" as I said above.  As
an aside I also happen to be in the camp that dislikes CDBS...


The specifics and complications don't matter for this discussion I
think.  If setup.py installs the correct file into the installdb then
it will work in almost all cases, Neal Becker confirmed this is true
for Fedora as well.


Regards
Floris

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