[Distutils] Default format for "bdist"

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Greg Ward wrote:
> 
> Hi all --
> 
> as no doubt many of you are aware, the default behaviour for the "bdist"
> command is to create a "dumb" built distribution -- a /-relative tarball
> on Unix, and a prefix-relative ZIP file on Windows.  I have at times had
> vague plans for making the Unix default whatever is sensible on the
> current platform: an RPM, a Debian package, a Free BSD package, a
> Solaris package, etc. etc.
> 
> I propose two changes to this:
> 
>   * make a dumb tarball the permanent and everlasting default for Unix:
>     I don't want to write code that attempts to figure out if the
>     current system is RPM-based or Debian-based or uses some other
>     packaging tool (and I'm not keen on adding Marc-André's über-"grok
>     this platform" module -- it's just too big)

Ok, but could you then at least make the archives platform
name an option then ? I wrote platform.py for just this reason
(it is used in the mxCGIPython project) and would of course
like to reuse its functionality for distutils too.

Perhaps you could make distutils use platform.py on an availability
basis: try to import it and fall back to sys.platform otherwise.

>   * make "wininst" the default format on Windows; I'm not aware of any
>     problems with this spiffy little self-installing ZIP file generator,
>     so why the heck not make it the default?

It's cool, yes... but it didn't work for me (I seem to be the unlucky
guy in this forum ;-() with Tim's Python 2.0 pre-release: it says
that it can't find a usable Python installation and the [...]
button doesn't allow me to select a proper target.

I'll try again with the final 1.6 Windows version.
 
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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