[Distutils] py2exe has a new maintainer

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:16 PM 10/4/2005 -0700, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>On the other hand, setuptools/eggs solves a lot of these problems
>(given appropriate metadata), so I'd target integration with that
>first and then bring in the "legacy" support that py2app does pretty
>well.  Requiring appropriate metadata from the packages themselves
>has a much brighter future than maintaining an external "quirks"
>infrastructure in (each) application packager.

Also, setuptools supports adding setup() keywords and commands in a more 
extensible way than subclassing Distribution, so there's no need to 
maintain a bunch of code to hook into the distutils if you just plug in 
with setuptools.  See:

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#creating-distutils-extensions

At this point, the easy_install command is capable of dumping all the 
needed eggs and any generated wrapper scripts into a target 
directory.  What it doesn't have is:

* frontend wrappers/packaging to actually build the .exe or app and resources

* module-finding or stdlib packaging to locate and bundle the needed 
portion of the standard library

It would be cool if these things could be integrated in such a way that a 
single setup() could be used to create both an OS X application and a 
Windows .exe.  As it happens, setuptools supports specifying additional 
eggs needed to run a particular setup command, so we can actually delay the 
requirement of the egg containing py2exe or py2app until somebody actually 
requests the command.

On the other hand, it's also possible that the metadata could be bundled 
into the egg metadata directory, which would then make it possible to have 
external bundling tools that just use the eggs to build the application, 
without needing to run the setup script at all.