Introduction to distutils

I have recently used distutils for the first time and it took me quite some time to get it working for me. I won't pretend I understand all of it, there is much mystery still!

This is a tutorial to take those new to distutils from a development project through to a setup.py of the project.

Please note: I am not a pro. All this is based on my own hacking and struggling to get things to work. I am sure there will be alternative ways to do things and that I will make mistakes. Caveat Emptor.

(Based on Gnu/Linux)

The layout of files and folders

A proper layout of your files and folders can really save you trouble later on. I use this layout:

.
|-- package
|   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- module.py
|   `-- things
|       |-- cross.png
|       |-- fplogo.png
|       `-- tick.png
|-- runner
|-- MANIFEST
|-- MANIFEST.in
|-- README
`-- setup.py

* The very top of the tree is some arbitrary folder, perhaps in your home directory under pythondev. It doesn't matter. * package - Is a folder. I call it this to indicate that it will be where you keep your Python packages.

• (Packages are simply folders with modules (py files) in them. They also have a special file called init.py so that Python will know that this folder is a package.)

* package/things - Is a folder. This is where I will keep all my things. Here I have some image files, but you can put anything your module may need here. Naturally you can use any folder name you like. * The other files are all in the root and will be described soon.