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

[Ian Bicking]

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"

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.

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org