MS RFC 57: Make mapscript easy_installable

Date:	2009/06/29
Author:	Mathieu Pasquet
Contact:	kiorky at cryptelium.net
Status:	Draft
Version:	MapServer 5.x / 6.x

Overview

Nowodays, most of the python deployment tools (minitage, buildout, pip, easy_install) rely on setuptools API and workflows to deploy python stuff. The idea is to make MapScript follow the egg dance.

Inventory of existing mechanisms

Today, what we have is a way to build a classical distutils's made distribution. The setup.py has some complicated code inside, i think it can be simplified or delegated in someway. We have mapserver-config (only unix as far as i know) which we can query for flags and information from the targeted mapserver installation.

Questions

Technical Solution

• Make the thing independant and indexed on the python cheesechop.

• Thus by throwing away the distutils imports and use setuptools to package our egg
• Then we can get all compilation and linking infos from the 'mapserver-config' script.

• A quick and dirty draft has been done for the 5.0.2 release and is available for checkout there : http://git.minitage.org/git/others/mapscript/

MapScript Implications

Files affected

Backwards compatibility issues

Bug ID

Voting history

Questions/Comments from the review period