Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zo...@zooko.com> wrote: > On May 10, 2009, at 11:18 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote: > > > If GNU stow solves all your problems, why do you want to use > > easy_install in the first place? > > That's a good question. The answer is that there are two separate > jobs: building executables and putting them in a directory structure > of the appropriate shape for your system is one job, and installing > or uninstalling that tree into your system is another. GNU stow does > only the latter. > > The input to GNU stow is a set of executables, library files, etc., > in a directory tree that is of the right shape for your system. For > example, if you are on a Linux system, then your scripts all need to > be in $prefix/bin/, your shared libs should be in $prefix/lib, your > Python packages ought to be in $prefix/lib/python$x.$y/site- > packages/, etc. GNU stow is blissfully ignorant about all issues of > building binaries, and choosing where to place files, etc. -- that's > the job of the build system of the package, e.g. the "./configure -- > prefix=foo && make && make install" for most C packages, or the > "python ./setup.py install --prefix=foo" for Python packages using > distutils (footnote 1). > > Once GNU stow has the well-shaped directory which is the output of > the build process, then it follows a very dumb, completely reversible > (uninstallable) process of symlinking those files into the system > directory structure.
Once you've got that well formed directory structure it is very easy to make it into a package (eg deb or rpm) so that idea is useful in general for package managers, not just stow. -- Nick Craig-Wood <n...@craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
