On 2009-12-22 12:48 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
By installer, I mean things produced by bdist_*. A significant portion
of windows users don't like eggs, and prefer .exe-based (or
.msi-based) installers. Currently, it is not possible to (reliably)
convert from one to the other (e.g. eggs->wininst), but there is no
reason why this is so.
There is most certainly a reason. The binary distribution may be lacking
pieces of source code that would be needed to build another (different)
binary distribution.
For example, if you have a Linux RPM or .deb, it is, in general, not
possible to create a Windows installer out of this, as you may need
to recompile extension modules. Including the full source code in the
binary distribution just to support this rare use case is unreasonable:
people who want a different package format can build from the source
package.
Yes, that use case is rare (and bizarre), but the desire to convert
Windows-platform eggs to .msi or .exe installers is not so rare and does not
present the same level of difficulty. The latter is the use case David was
referring to, not the one you outlined.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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