[Distutils] How can I create prebuilt distributions?

[Jack Jansen]

I remember that this was discussed some time ago, but at that time I 
wasn't interested, and now I can't find it back in the archives. Can 
someone help me out?

I want to create binary packages (i.e. packages that are usable if the 
end-user doesn't have a development environment). For now I'm happy 
with something that works on Unix (MacOSX to be specific).

I had always thought that bdist did this, but it turns out that it does 
something completely different: it creates a tar file with all 
pathnames already hard-coded. This isn't good enough, as it doesn't 
allow the end user to select install location, etc.

What I want as output is a tarfile with inside it basically a tree that 
has seen "setup.py build", but with some extra glue so it doesn't try 
to build again. If I simply tar the tree after the build this doesn't 
work: on the destination machine it still tries to build things, 
probably due to differences in modification times or something. This 
won't work if the end user doesn't have a c compiler, of course.

Also, I wouldn't mind losing all the source code to trim down the 
archive size.
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -