Ben Finney wrote: > > I presume, by “meta-requirement”, you're showing awareness that this > is something very much dependent on motivating people to actually > create those installers for each and every package. >
Yes, and eggs decreases this motivation, as eggs are cross-platform (if only python code of course), so people do not build .exe anymore. With a wininst/msi-based installation, you get more features, which fit more with what many windows users expect (software shown in install/remove panel, can be removed). So those windows users have a worse install experience than before eggs were widespread. > > Does “any machine” include those without MSI-creation tools? I imagine > (but would love to know otherwise) that the creation of an MSI package > cannot be done on any arbitrary Windows machine, but needs special > (external to distutils) programs and/or libraries installed first. > No, it doesn't need anything special, as it is included in python (msilib is available at least in python >= 2.5 stdlib). Actually, you can build almost any extension from wine as long as mingw compilers are an option, msi or wininst-based. Msi in particular have features that eggs will most likely never be able to support well (group policy support, which is something that some numpy/scipy users have regularly requested). cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
