[Distutils] [Python-Dev] distlib updated with resources API

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2. Some level of standardised functionality for building and
> installing. By "standardised", I mean that given *any* sdist, no
> matter what build tool it uses under the scenes, there is a way of
> saying "build this, and put the output into the following
> directories". For distutils, this is --install-XXX. Distribute
> complicates this by changing the meaning of these options (you need
> --single-version-externally-managed and --record) but otherwise
> follows the standard. Add an API to wrap this (include autodetection
> of setuptools/distribute, and hooks for other tools to integrate in,
> and you're done). A wrapper like this might be a good thing to have in
> distlib.

Note that one of the core goals of wheel is to finally break the
distutils conflation of "build" and "install". They're different
things, but the lack of a platform-neutral binary format has meant
that they've largely been conflated in practice for Python
distribution. Any new build hook should be as hands off as possible
and have a wheel (or a wheel-format directory) as the result, which is
then installed according to the normal rules.

> 5. Conversion tools to build things like RPMs or MSIs from a wheel
> would likely be the best way to integrate platform-format installers.

I actually need to be able to generate an SRPM from an sdist, as SRPM
-> RPM is the only build system Koji understands. However, the
advantage of wheel is that it should be possible to automatically
generate a SPEC file which is actually half decent (by running the
build hook and introspecting the resulting wheel).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia