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#!rst
.. _rfc57:

====================================================
  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
-----------------------------------------

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