How to strip source from distutils binary distributions?

Question

I want to create a bytecode-only distribution from distutils (no really, I do; I know what I'm doing). Using setuptools and the bdist_egg command, you can simply provide the --exclude-source parameter. Unfortunately the standard commands don't have such an option.

• Is there an easy way to strip the source files just before the tar.gz, zip, rpm or deb is created.
• Is there a relatively clean per-command way to do this (eg just for tar.gz or zip).

Answer 1

The distutils "build_py" command is the one that matters, as it's (indirectly) reused by all the commands that create distributions. If you override the byte_compile(files) method, something like:

try:
    from setuptools.command.build_py import build_py
except ImportError:
    from distutils.command.build_py import build_py

class build_py(build_py)
   def byte_compile(self, files):
       super(build_py, self).byte_compile(files)
       for file in files:
           if file.endswith('.py'):
               os.unlink(file)

setup(
    ...
    cmdclass = dict(build_py=build_py),
    ...
)

You should be able to make it so that the source files are deleted from the build tree before they're copied to the "install" directory (which is a temporary directory when bdist commands invoke them).

Note: I have not tested this code; YMMV.