While PEP 345 and PEP 386 are waiting for the final approval, I am back at work on Distutils code work, PEP 376, Distribute, and the HitchHicker guide to Packaging. The latter is growing faster than I have expected, thanks to the contributions of John Gabriele. It has quite some content already. I think the guide is an important task, and I’ll try to focus on it in this first trimester.

Distutils 2.7 new features

Python 2.7 first beta version is around the corner, and once it’s reached we can’t add new features. So, besides the code that will be changed if the PEPs we worked on at Distutils-SIG are accepted, here’s a list of small features I’d like to introduce in Distutils:

a test command , that just uses the new unittest discovery script to run unittest-compatible tests.

, that just uses the new unittest discovery script to run unittest-compatible tests. a new option for sdist called ‘extra_files’ , that will allow to list extra files to be included in the distribution. These files will not be installed by ‘install’, just be part of the distribution. This will allow including files like CHANGELOG, etc.. without having to use a MANIFEST template.

, that will allow to list extra files to be included in the distribution. These files will not be installed by ‘install’, just be part of the distribution. This will allow including files like CHANGELOG, etc.. without having to use a MANIFEST template. a very basic pre/post commit hook for the install command. These hooks will be deactivated when any bdist_* command runs install to create the binary tree. Now for bdist_rpm own hooks, I guess the best way would be to make install consumes the same two options than bdist_rpm (pre-install, post-install) so a project will be able to define a hook that is used by RPM and/or python setup.py install

If you think about something that should be added in 2.7, speak up !