> I've been re-thinking the UpLib Windows installer technology, and it > occurred to me to wonder why I can't just use the nice bdist_msi module > in Python to build my packages. I took a look, and it seems almost > doable. Presumably you wrote it?
Correct. > UpLib is a big package, with lots of Python and Java and C programs, and > for Windows I package it with lots of other programs like those from > xpdf. All of this is installed in C:\Program Files\UpLib\VERSION\, in > bin, lib, share, and so forth subdirectories. If I autogenerated a > setup.py file which described everything as "data_files", it should be > simple to package everything up in a Cab, and bdist_msi apparently also > provides the ability to add pre- and post-install scripts. Everything > I need, really. > > There are a couple of Python-specific options in the code: the "Product > Name" is prefixed with the python version, and in the GUI, the default > location is the location of a Python distro. If the package had a > "--non-python" option which would defeat these, and perhaps also set > "no-target-optimize" and "no-target-compile" to True, it would be a > simple but pretty general-purpose packager module. I'd rather recommend to base this off msilib directly, instead of trying to subvert bdist_msi to do what you want. There is actually quite a lot python-specifics in bdist_msi. If you find this too tedious to use, please propose *base classes* that could become part of msilib, rather than trying to create *subclasses* of the bdist_msi classes. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
