Re: [PyX-devel] Problems with lfs files when installed to non-standard location

[Andre W. <wo...@us...>]

Hi Fernando,

On 20.04.04, Fernando Perez wrote:
> Thanks for addressing this.  I noticed you are discussing the finer points 
> of the solution, and running into the usual (and incredibly annoying) 
> limitations of distutils.

I've seen you joining those discussions in the c.l.p and we had this
issue together before as well (I think it was on this list). So let me
briefly tell you, what solution I came up yesterday. Its not at all
perfect, but I think it points into the correct direction to go.

So first of all I decided we would need a siteconfig.py file, where I
just store the path configuration. This is part of the pyx module, so
it lives in the source tree. There is already a siteconfig.py in CVS
and it will also be in the source distribution. It calculates path
information relative to its current position, so you can start using
PyX right from the CVS or from an unpacked source distribution.

When installing PyX via distutils however, the siteconfig.py is not
copied from the source tree, but a new one is created containing the
actual install positions. I did this step within build_py, because
this way I can just replace the copy operation by something else for
this single file (this is slightly different from the solution I had
first). The only disadvantage is, that you have to create a dependency
of this build step from install_data to get the positions you need to
write into siteconfig.py! (Obviously a better solution would be to
create a install_siteconfig or the like, but it is more complicated to
inject into distutils.)

As far as I can see this solution works well and it obviously helps to
fix the problem you had. It would be good to test this new install
behaviour with a release candidate before the next release, so may be
there are some volunteers around here, who would like to do so. I
would appreciate testing on Windows at most, since I can do Linux
(Debian) and Mac OS (fink) myself. But I do not like to build a test
trunk for the new setup.py currently, because parts of PyX are broken
the CVS due to development right now.

Another thing would be to discuss this issue and the PyX solution we
have now on sig-distutils or the like. Its obviously a general problem
within distutils and its missing a standard solution. We might
postpone that until we have some feedback from our new solution ...


André

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