[et-mgmt-tools] [RFC] Approach to installing a localized virtinst

[Cole Robinson]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 02:44:29PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I've recently undertaken adding localization support to virtinst. Since 
>> currently build and install from source is done using a typical setup.py 
>> script, I've encountered several issues involving how to handle 
>> installing the locale files, and making virtinst aware of where they are.
>>
>> The attached patch handles the first issue: I added custom functionality 
>> to to the build and install_data commands as invoked in the setup 
>> script. The build command searchs po/ for any .po files and invokes 
>> msgfmt to compile them. The install_data additions have to do some silly 
>>  things to name the files correctly as distutils cannot rename extra 
>> install files on the fly (ex. moves po/es.mo to build/es/virtinst.mo).
>>
>> The second problem is a bit more perplexing. The path to the locale 
>> files has to be placed into a virtinst header so that the library knows 
>> where to look for them. Possible solutions I see:
>>
>> 1) Extracting the install root from setup.py mid run. This has to happen 
>> after build but before actual install. The locale path could then be 
>> formed and sed'd or some equivalent into a virtinst header file, which 
>> would than have to be (re)compiled and moved to the build directory. 
>> Ugly way to do it, but the user can still use setup.py as normal and all 
>> should work.
> 
> I think since your example for installing .po files is already overriding
> the install_data class, we might as well override the install_lib class
> and substitute in the local directory path at that point.
> 
>> Thoughts? I'm not too familiar with this stuff so I may be overlooking a 
>> simpler solution, or oversimplifying a complex one!
> 
> Python's distutils is pretty horribly limited compared to comparable
> tools, so I think overloading the install_lib is easiest option, unless
> we were to throw out distutils completely which isn't exactly easy either. 
> 
> Dan.

Yeah install_lib definitely seems like the way to go. I didn't realize 
the python byte-code compiling was done during the install and not the 
build, so its a pretty clean fix this way. I'll be sending the patches 
out shortly.

Thanks,
Cole

-- 
Cole Robinson
crobinso at redhat.com