[Distutils] Was I asleep?

[Greg Ward]

On 25 August 2000, Mark W. Alexander said:
> And finally....Documentation. What's with perl and LaTeX2HTML?

Perl's not so bad, it's LaTeX2HTML.  You can extend it by writing Perl
subroutines -- not so bad if you know Perl, *except* that the interface
is bizarre, undocumented, and subject to random changes.  I think it
boils down to this: to process the Python docs, you need to be using a
specific beta version of LaTeX2HTML from mid-1998, which in turn
necessitates using Perl 5.005 -- L2H, or at least this specific beta
from mid-1998, bombs under Perl 5.6.

At least, I think that's what the situation is.

> My need for documentation is growing since I'm trying to
> do bdist_pkgtool and bdist_sdux in, well let's just say
> a less casual approach. bdist_pkgtool has stuff hard-coded
> ("build/lib", etc) because I didn't have time to really
> figure out the correct ways to find information. Is there
> any hacker's guide to distutils info any where (beside's
> the source, of course!). Especially what bdist_* has
> available....

Alas, there is no guide to the internals.  ;-(  Use The Source, Luke.
Spend some time with bdist_dumb; it's much simpler than bdist_rpm, and
was mainly written 1) to demonstrate that built distributions were
indeed possible, and 2) as an example to authors of new bdist_*
commands.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - programmer-at-large                         gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
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