[Distutils] More Windows questions

[Chris Lambacher]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 12:12:32AM -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 12:15 AM 10/4/2006 -0400, Chris Lambacher wrote:
> >You might need ctypes or win32all or a C
> >extension to figure out what permissions a user has.
> 
> Well, I suppose I could just try modifying the registry.  :)  The big 
> question is whether that causes a bunch of warnings to pop up, or triggers 
> antivirus programs.  Any thoughts?
It looks like _winreg raises an exception if the process does not have
sufficient privileges.  On vanilla XP I expect that is all that happens.  Who
knows what kind of wacky things 3rd party security programs do.  I would think
it would be really annoying if some security program popped up a dialog every
time some process tried to do something it did not have the privileges for.
Sounds like Vista is going to have just that sort of annoyance though some of
that is probably anti-MS FUD.

> 
> 
> >On the download side, is there a way to force the download to go through 
> >the
> >windows APIs that perform the proxy authentication?  I think the Cygwin
> >installer does something like that.  I always used
> >http://ntlmaps.sourceforge.net/ which is written in python and licensed 
> >under
> >GPL.
> 
> ...which effectively makes it incompatible with setuptools' licensing.
> 
> 
> >  Maybe that can be used, unless I misunderstand the download issue.
> 
> The issue is that you still have to tell MAPS where to find the proxy 
> settings, as well as the authentication info to use, even if you run it.
> 
> However, if someone wants to create a way to run a MAPS plugin for 
> setuptools, I'll add entry point support so that it can be plugged in 
> independently.  That way, somebody can make a plugin egg that uses MAPS to 
> provide proxy support, and *that* library would have to be GPL, but 
> setuptools would not because it's just providing a generic customization 
> hook for installed programs to be told when setuptools is about to do 
> network access.
> 
> One could possibly even write some crazy plugin that actually used IE via 
> COM to do the same thing, come to think of it, or to provide a GUI 
> interface for downloading.  :)
You might also want to think about a "just download, don't install" option,
with the follow on of pretend I am running x version of Python on y platform,
so that it would be possible to just go an get all the dependencies of a
particular egg.

-Chris