setuptools without unexpected downloads

[Steve Holden]

kyosohma at gmail.com wrote:
> On Sep 26, 8:30 am, Steve Holden <st... at holdenweb.com> wrote:
>> Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>>> Paul Boddie wrote:
>>>> P.S. Of course, the package maintainer problem manifests itself most
>>>> prominently on Windows where you often see people asking for pre-built
>>>> packages or installers.
>>> for the record, I'd love to see a group of volunteers doing stuff like
>>> this for Windows.  there are plenty of volunteers that cover all major
>>> Linux/*BSD distributions (tons of thanks to everyone involved in this!),
>>> but as far as I can remember, nobody has ever volunteered to do the same
>>> for Windows.
>> I'd like to see something like this happen, too, and if a group of
>> volunteers emerges I'll do what I can through the PSF to provide
>> resources. Activities that benefit the whole community (or a large part
>> of it) are, IMHO, well worth supporting.
> 
> What would it entail to do this? Using py2exe + some installer (like
> Inno Setup) to create an installer that basically copies/installs the
> files into the site-packages folder or wherever the user chooses? If
> that's all it is, I would think it would be fairly easy to create
> these. Maybe I'm over-simplifying it though.
> 
> What are a some examples of packages that need this?
> 
MySQLdb and psycopg are two obvious examples I have had to grub around 
or produce my own installers for. There's generally some configuration 
work to do for packages that have been produced without considering 
Windows requirements, and ideally this will be fed back to the developers.

I think you may be oversimplifying a little. Pure Python packages aren't 
too problematic, it's mostly the extension modules. Unless a copy of 
Visual Studio is available (and we *might* get some cooperation from 
Microsoft there) that means resorting to MingW, which isn't an easy 
environment to play with (in my occasional experience, anyway).

There's going to be increasing demand for 64-bit implementations too.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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Sorry, the dog ate my .sigline