Hi, I wonder if there is any interest in the current distribute effort to specify some low-level commonalities outside the distutils code for interoperation. In particular, I had two things in mind: 1 Formally specifying the egg format (and versioning it !) - or is egg format outside distribute goal ? 2 Formally specifying something like a build manifest which would be used for installation.
I think the first point is self-explanatory. Concerning the second point, the current way of installing things in distutils is a bit too ad-hoc to my taste, and could be fixed inside distutils to make it easier to interoperate with other methods (be it native OS methods or other python-related tools). Right now, distutils install things from a list of files, but this only contains the target location for some kind of files. What about the following kind of format instead (or in complement for backward-compatibility): - split the flat list into a list of "typed" sections, where type would be e.g. data, python files, extensions, scripts, etc... - for each section, specify both the source and target directory. - the format should be easy to parse/produce, and versioned. The rationale is that such a format would enable the following: - it becomes easier to post-process files at install time, with different methods for each type - such a format could form a basis to produce "conventional" install, eggs and other kind of installers, including convertion between them. Assuming this idea fits into what people involved in distribute are doing, I would be willing to propose a more formal description - I already have the implementation in my own project toydist, where I use build manifest to do explicit install and eggs/wininst conversion. cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
