Why not use python disutils?

[Gaz]

Is there a reason why reviewboard has chosen autoconf/automake instead
of python disutils as it's distribution/install tool of choice?

As it only includes python and data files the use of automake would
appear to be a largely overkill, and as I have to patch the
Makefile.am files every time I want to use them, I can only assume
that the main developers aren't actively using it.

Therefore, would it make sense to switch to distutils (which django
uses), or am I missing some subtleties of the install process? I've
only dabbled with automake and haven't touched disutils at all, so
it's more than possibly I'm missing some obvious advantage or glaring
problem.


G.

[Bruce Stephens]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Gaz <gow...@gmail.com> wrote:

> [...] or am I missing some subtleties of the install process?

I suspect most people use it without installing it. (That would
explain the frequent
brokenness you note. Last time I looked django_evolution wasn't being
installed,
for example.)

I agree, I'd have thought distutils would make more sense than autoconf.

[Christian Hammond]

autoconf was chosen early on due to some of the things we wanted to do that distutils didn't easily allow for. I believe preprocessing of server configuration files was one of those things.

I'm looking into moving over to distutils before 1.0.

Christian

--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
VMware, Inc.

[Bruce Stephens]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Christian Hammond <chi...@chipx86.com> wrote:
> autoconf was chosen early on due to some of the things we wanted to do that
> distutils didn't easily allow for. I believe preprocessing of server
> configuration files was one of those things.
>
> I'm looking into moving over to distutils before 1.0.

Ah, right. I confess I don't know much about distutils. I'd assumed
it could do things like
that.

Not a big issue before 1.0 in that I suspect most people don't install
anyway? Might
be worth saying that somewhere, just to avoid unnecessary frustation amonst us
newbies?

[David Trowbridge]

I was having a lot of trouble getting distutils to do fancy things,
like process a text file with
the installation path (like the sample apache configs), or install
"data" into the same directory
as the code. After fighting with it for weeks, I spent half an hour
and implemented it with
what I knew, which was (for better or worse), autotools.

Distutils/easy_setup is probably ideal, if it can be made to do what
we need (or if we can
refactor things to avoid needing them).

-David

[Christian Hammond]

I'm in the process of moving things over to setuptools/easy_setup and have some of this figured out. In the coming weeks I should have something that lets us remove the autotools support and start doing nightly packages that people can just easy_install.

Christian

--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
VMware, Inc.