Status of bdist_wininst (Was: Re: [Distutils] Default format for "bdist")

[Thomas Heller]

Marc-Andre wrote:
> >
>
> >   * 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.
>
The status of bdist_wininst in the 1.6 and 2.0b distributions
is a little bit messy. This is partly because I have been very
busy with private things over the last four weeks.
My apologies for this.

1.6 final has distutils version 0.9.1.
bdist_wininst still uses the old GUI, and only (hardcoded) knows
about the 1.5 and 1.6 python versions in the registy. It also
has some bugs which were fixed in the meantime:
'setup.py bdist_wininst' fails when the 'dist' directory does
not exist.

2.0b1 has distutils version 0.9.2.
bdist_wininst uses the new GUI, no hardcoded python version strings
any more, no requirement for zlib. Seems to work fine, although
some features are missing:
- does not take care of the 'extra_path' argument.
- does not compile pyc and/or pyo files.

I have prepared a new version, which I will check in
as soon as I get ssh installed and working correctly.

Thomas