On 14 April 2015 at 06:37, David Cournapeau <courn...@gmail.com> wrote: > pywin32 is one of the most used package in the python ecosystem, and its > post install script is not trivial.
And yet pywin32's postinstall script is completely virtualenv-hostile. It registers start menu entries (not applicable when installing in a virtualenv), registers itself as a COM server (once again, one per machine), adds registry entries (again, virtualenv-hostile), moves installed files into the Windows system directory (ditto) etc. And yet for many actual uses of pywin32, installing as a wheel without running the postinstall is sufficient. With the exception of writing COM servers in Python (and maybe writing services, but I thing cx_Freeze lets you do that without pywin32), pretty much every use *I* have seen of pywin32 can be replaced with ctypes or cffi with no loss of functionality. I'd argue that pywin32 is a perfect example of a project where *not* supporting postinstall scripts would be a good idea, as it would encourage the project to find a way to implement the same functionality in a way that's compatible with current practices (virtualenv, tox, etc). Or it would encourage other projects to stop depending on pywin32 (which is actually what is happening, many projects now use ctypes and similar in place of pywin32-using code, to avoid the problems pywin32 causes for them). Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig