distutils, 'scripts' and Windows

[George van den Driessche]

Hi folks,

I'm looking at packaging a project I'm working on using distutils. The 
project is for Windows and contains a COM server which needs 
registration, so the installer needs to be a little more complicated 
than usual. Looking at the options for the bdist_wininst command to 
distutils, I see it's possible to specify
  --install-script=<myinstallscript>
which ought to do the trick. But to use this, myinstallscript itself 
must first be installed by passing
  scripts='myinstallscript'
to distutils.core.setup in setup.py. That will copy myinstallscript 
into a particular location (C:\Python24\Scripts in my case) and leave 
it there forever. Which raises a couple of questions:

- Why is myinstallscript left there forever? The documentation makes 
some vague reference to needing it for uninstalling packages, but then 
I can't actually find a way to uninstall packages.

- What is the use of the Scripts directory on Windows? It's not added 
to my PATH, so unless I do that myself it won't do anything like it's 
meant to on other platforms.

- Should I supply myinstallscript, or myinstallscript.py? I suspect the 
latter, since that's the only way to give files types on Windows.

- Is there some other better way to perform post-installation actions? 
Would it work out of a binary generated from bdist_wininst?

- Should I even be using distutils? It doesn't really matter that much 
where the files are installed because the COM server can register 
itself to run out of whatever location it happens to be in.

Thanks,
George