Re: [Visualpython-users] History and Status?

[Bruce S. <bas...@un...>]

I enjoyed working/playing today with the distutils package Arthur so
helpfully provided. This was on Windows, making and testing binary
installers, with and without IDLE, etc. Very nice, very convenient. Even
does a perfect job of cleaning up on an uninstall from the "Add/remove
program" control panel.

Consider for the moment the case of a complete turnkey bundle for newcomers
(ideally, a single installer for Python, Numeric, Visual and its docs and
demos, idlefork until it gets into the regular Python distribution, and less
ideally two or three installers). A rather important piece of this is
something that I don't see how to do with distutils, which is to provide a
desktop shortcut (alias) to the editing environment (idlefork). This
shortcut is created by the current VPython installer on Windows, which also
puts an entry on the Python section of the Start menu.

Any ideas on how to address that in the distutils scheme of things?

A related question is whether there is a way in distutils to refer
symbolically to the directory where Python is found (normally C:\PythonXX,
but a user can install it anywhere). That would be a piece of constructing a
shortcut (alias). I even tried including a shortcut that could be dragged
from site-packages\visual onto the desktop, but alas a shortcut must have
absolute file references.

It isn't absolutely necessary to find a distutils solution to this, because
there is really only one situation where this comes up, a novice-oriented
bundled binary installer for Windows, and I can continue building such a
thing using other tools, letting distutils handle all other situations
(presumably in source form). I would however change the installation
locations to those that Arthur and others have championed -- everything in
site-packages\visual (visual, docs, demos, idlefork).

Incidentally, I very hastily tried using the distutils installer on Mac OSX
in the X11 framework and was told, "gcc: cannot specify -o with -c or -S and
multiple compilations". I'm guessing this has to do with the
"extra_compile_args" at the start of setup.py, which look like they're set
for Windows?

Bruce Sherwood