Binary generation with distutils? (Freeze, py2exe, etc.)

[Michael Hudson]

Fernando Pérez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> 
> > 
> > - Magnus (who also is a bit baffled as to why distutils doesn't
> > include an "uninstall" command, such as the one implemented by
> > Thomas Heller.)
> 
> Amen. It's incredibly annoying to have to tell users that a simple python 
> setup.py install does the trick as far as splattering files all over their 
> system, but that there's no reasonable way of undoing the process easily.

http://www.python.org/patches/ :)

> I realize how busy the core team is, but I truly hope that in the
> future someone finds time to give distutils a serious revamp. It's
> sorely needed, and it's IMHO a key piece of the python puzzle as a
> solid, wide-availability, cross-platform language.

People only complain that, e.g. "distutils doesn't do uninstall" or
"distutils doesn't do binary packages for platform X" because it does
the things it does so very well.  It is never going to be perfect,
because by definition it has to cope with all kinds of horrible
cross-platform nastiness, insane shell quoting, etc.

Even in it's current state, the distutils package is an amazing piece
of work.  I think people forget this sometimes.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  > I'm a little confused.
  That's because you're Australian!  So all the blood flows to
  your head, away from the organ most normal guys think with.
                        -- Mark Hammond & Tim Peters, comp.lang.python