[sugar] Python: distutils, setuptools, packages, etc

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 19:57 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
> Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> > There will be activities wrote in C, or activities based on application 
> > already using auto*. Getting these to use distutils would not be 
> > productive (if possible at all).
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > But we are going to have documentation on how to write activities and 
> > bless a build system for activities that are written from scratch in 
> > python (which should be the most common case). setuptools might be a 
> > good candidate for this. It would be positive to think and experiment in 
> > this direction. We want to be really easy to write activities. And I 
> > would never put auto* and really easy in the same phrase :)
> 
> I envision *a* process for building a new app/bundle/activity that was 
> pure-Python to be:
> 
> * Create a proper setup.py (a fairly simple file)
> * Maybe add a few settings to setup.cfg
> * Run "python setup.py olpc_bundle"

Assuming we can coerce setup.py to put stuff where we want, yes.  If you
look at the proposal for Activity Bundles, we want everything for an
activity in one directory (like OS X) and not blown all over the system
like most stuff now is under Linux.  It's not trivial to do with auto*,
but not that hard either.  Hopefully it will be pretty easy with
distutils too?

Dan

> And then you'll get a bundle, which I imagine will be a directory with a 
> few eggs (both your package, and any non-standard dependencies) and some 
> metadata taken from setup.cfg (whatever ends up in the bundle spec). 
> The setup.py file itself will probably just be a normal setup.py file 
> like people currently write.
>