Egg support for system packages (including bdist_wininst)
Setuptools in SVN now provides preliminary support for installing eggs in
.egg-info directory style, so that setuptools-based projects can be wrapped
by system packagers who wish to avoid using .egg files or directories. In
addition, you can now use setuptools to install non-setuptools packages in
such a way that an .egg-info directory is included, so that
setuptools-based packages can detect the presence of the
non-setuptools-based package.
If you are building packages using a distutils command such as
'bdist_wininst' that internally invokes the distutils "install" command,
you do not need to do anything special. Setuptools detects when the
"install" command is invoked programmatically (via run_command()) and
automatically enters its backward-compatibility mode.
However, if you are using a command such as 'bdist_rpm' that generates
external scripts which then run "setup.py install", you will need to modify
the generated scripts to run this instead:
setup.py install --single-version-externally-managed
You will also need to include the --root or --record options.
For the 'bdist_rpm' command, setuptools automatically adjusts the 'spec'
files before they're written, so bdist_rpm *should* work correctly,
although I haven't tested it yet. Please let me know if you find any
problems, as I have not yet tested this installation mode with anything but
bdist_wininst or direct manual installation.
For persons like Paul Moore who want to wrap egg-based packages in Windows
installers, note that you can now take a setuptools-based package's source
and run "setup.py bdist_wininst" and it will build a usable .exe.
In addition, you can build Windows installer-wrapped eggs for
non-setuptools packages by changing your command line from:
python setup.py bdist_wininst
to:
python -c "import setuptools;execfile('setup.py')" bdist_wininst
This will build an .exe that includes .egg-info, so that other packages
will be able to detect it at runtime.
Similarly, if you are building any other kind of system package using
"python setup.py install", you can force .egg-info to be included by using
this instead:
python -c "import setuptools;execfile('setup.py')" install \
--single-version-externally-managed ...
This support for system packages of eggs is still early and experimental;
please let me know about any problems you may encounter or any questions
you may have. Thanks.
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