On 9/12/2010 3:40 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
Paul Watson<paul.hermeneu...@gmail.com> writes:
What is the currently favored installation process for Python
applications?
‘python ./setup.py install’, using the standard library's Distutils
library.
Other third-party libraries build on top of that and are generally
backward-compatible.
The last time I looked, it was eggs. Is that still true?
I don't think eggs were ever the favoured distribution method. They are
one *option* provided by Setuptools, but even then a so-called “sdist”
(source distribution) is the favoured distribution format, installed
using the above command.
Any good links to source of information. I would like to instill the
habit of using a decent install process for even the smallest of
utilities.
This is a dream shared by many, but Distutils has much improvement to be
done yet. Recently — the past couple of years — a lot of progress has
been made on this front, and Python 3.x is getting many of the benefits;
look up the “Distutils2” efforts for more.
There's some discussion of a common installer on the Python
development group, but that's probably the wrong approach. A more
effective approach would be something that takes a standard "setup.py"
file and wraps it in a Windows installer file, an RPM file, or whatever
the platform uses as standard.
The "eggs" system never worked very well. It made too many
assumptions about where various things were, and when it guessed
wrong, you were stuck.
John Nagle
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