[Distutils] Question about usage of pje's setuptools

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:11 PM 11/17/2005 +0000, Luc Stepniewski wrote:
>I have made a program that I want to distribute as an egg. The problem is 
>that
>I need to put some files in directories like /etc/init.d and some
>configurations in a newly created directory in /etc.
>I know there is the "entry_points" + "console_scripts" stuff that I can 
>use in
>my setup.py, but this is only for putting executables in /usr/bin.
>
>I know that setuptools is pretty new, and I understand the reasons why the
>sandbox refuses to create files outside of it, but if so, how do people 
>develop
>big applications, that require configuration files, init files (at boot I
>mean), etc.?

The common approach to this is to define console scripts that perform 
installation and uninstallation of configuration files, creation of project 
files, etc.

At some point, I'm thinking it might be useful to provide some install-time 
entry point facility for doing these things as part of installation, but in 
the meantime the recommended approach is to provide console scripts that 
the user runs.

(One advantage to separate scripts is that you can offer either an 
interactive setup or provide task-specific command-line options, since it's 
rare that you have an application whose /etc  configuration can be 100% 
automated, due to differences in setup from one machine to the next.)