I wrote a quick program in Python to add a gtk GUI to a cli program. How can I create an installer using distutils? Since it's just a GUI frontend for a command line app it only works in *nix anyway so I'm not worried about it being cross platform.
My goal is to create a .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu users, but I don't understand make/configure files.
See the distutils simple example. That's basically what it is like, except real install scripts usually contain a bit more information. I have not seen any that are fundamentally more complicated, though. In essence, you just give it a list of what needs to be installed. Sometimes you need to give it some mapping dicts since the source and installed trees might not be the same.
Here is a real-life (anonymized) example:
#!/usr/bin/python
from distutils.core import setup
setup (name = 'Initech Package 3',
description = "Services and libraries ABC, DEF",
author = "That Guy, Initech Ltd",
author_email = "[email protected]",
version = '1.0.5',
package_dir = {'Package3' : 'site-packages/Package3'},
packages = ['Package3', 'Package3.Queries'],
data_files = [
('/etc/Package3', ['etc/Package3/ExternalResources.conf'])
])
apt-get install python-stdeb
Python to Debian source package conversion utility
This package provides some tools to produce Debian packages from Python packages via a new distutils command, sdist_dsc. Automatic defaults are provided for the Debian package, but many aspects of the resulting package can be customized via a configuration file.
distutils really isn't all that difficult once you get the hang of it. It's really just a matter of putting in some meta-information (program name, author, version, etc) and then selecting what files you want to include. For example, here's a sample distutils setup.py module from a decently complex python library:
Note that this doesn't deal with any data files or or whatnot, so YMMV.
On another note, I agree that the distutils documentation is probably some of python's worst documentation. It is extremely inclusive in some areas, but neglects some really important information in others.
