Current install methodolgy eggs?

[Paul Watson]

What is the currently favored installation process for Python applications?

The last time I looked, it was eggs. Is that still true? Is there any
integration of eggs and handling into the base Python distribution? Is
PEP 376 intended for applications written in Python, or just the Python
distribution?

Any good links to source of information. I would like to instill the
habit of using a decent install process for even the smallest of utilities.

 

[John Nagle]

‘python ./setup.py install’, using the standard library's Distutils
library.

Other third-party libraries build on top of that and are generally
backward-compatible.


I don't think eggs were ever the favoured distribution method. They are
one *option* provided by Setuptools, but even then a so-called “sdistâ€
(source distribution) is the favoured distribution format, installed
using the above command.


This is a dream shared by many, but Distutils has much improvement to be
done yet. Recently — the past couple of years — a lot of progress has
been made on this front, and Python 3.x is getting many of the benefits;
look up the “Distutils2†efforts for more.

There's some discussion of a common installer on the Python
development group, but that's probably the wrong approach. A more
effective approach would be something that takes a standard "setup.py"
file and wraps it in a Windows installer file, an RPM file, or whatever
the platform uses as standard.

The "eggs" system never worked very well. It made too many
assumptions about where various things were, and when it guessed
wrong, you were stuck.

John Nagle

 

[Paul Watson]

This is a dream shared by many, but Distutils has much improvement to be
done yet. Recently — the past couple of years — a lot of progress has
been made on this front, and Python 3.x is getting many of the benefits;
look up the “Distutils2†efforts for more.

Many thanks for your comments, Ben. Looks like I should learn distutils
well.

I see the distutils2 work going on. I hope it is designed to work with
Python 2.x. That would help it get some traction in existing packages.

Most platforms have an installation methodology. Oracle Solaris (yea,
hard for me to get use to as well) has pkgadd. Microsoft has the .msi
installer. Do you think it would be possible to create a toolset that
would produce installation kits in each of these forms? That would make
the install conform with the standard platform installer. Is this
worthwhile thinking about?