Inserting a Step Into the Building of a Distributable

Thaumaturge · April 29, 2023, 11:21am

When generating a distributable build of a program, is there a way to insert a custom step–a Python script, or a set of OS-commands, perhaps–between the population of the “build” directory and the packaging of its contents into the “dist” directory?

To explain:

As mentioned in this thread, I have a situation in which some of my egg-files are unavailable to the build-process for conversion into bam-files, due to being located in a multifile.

My thought there was to perform the conversion myself when creating the multifile–but it has occurred to me that there’s another way:

I could eschew creating the multifile as a pre-processing step, and instead have it as part of the build process. This would allow the build-system to convert my egg-files into bam-files as per usual (as they would not yet be within the multifile), after which I could then package the converted directory into the multifile.

However, I would want this to happen before the distributable zip-file is made from the contents of the “build” directory.

Is that feasible, and if so, how might it be done?

rdb · May 7, 2023, 8:21am

This would make for a great feature request!

Thaumaturge · May 7, 2023, 9:27am

I will take that to mean that it’s not currently feasible!

Which is fair enough! I have thus created such a feature request on the GitHub “issue” page, which should be found at the link below.

github.com/panda3d/panda3d

Allow the Insertion of a Step into the Building of a Distributable

opened 09:27AM - 07 May 23 UTC

ArsThaumaturgis

enhancement

## Description In short, I feel that it may be useful to be able to specify a c…ustom step in the building process, taking place between the population of the "build" directory and the packaging of its contents into the "dist" directory. I imagine this as perhaps an optional callback (maybe specified in "setup.py"?) to a Python-script provided by the developer. ## Use Case There may be times in which a project wants for additional processing in the making of a distributable, and specifically done after the generation of its final file-structure in the "build" directory, but before everything is packed up into the "dist" directory. This might be to convert files, to adjust file structure, or otherwise to alter things to suit the shift from the environment of "development" to the environment of "distribution". For example, in a project of my own in which I want to pack certain models into a multifile for distribution. These are, naturally, originally in "egg" format, and I would prefer of course that in distribution they be instead in the optimised "bam" format. The build system already has the functionality to perform this conversion--but not if the files are packed into a multifile. Naturally, one answer to this is to convert them myself before packing them into the multifile. But it would be handy, I feel, to instead simply place the packing step between the "build" step--which would convert the files as a matter of course--and the "dist" step.