Overview¶

From scratch¶

Bento packages are created from a bento.info file, which describes metadata as well as package content in a mostly declarative manner.

For a simple python package hello consisting of two files:

hello/__init__.py
hello/hello.py

a simple bento.info may be written as follows:

Name: hello
Version: 1.0

Library:
    Packages:
        hello

The file contains some metadata, like package name and version. Its syntax is indentation-based, like python, except that only spaces are allowed (tab character will cause an error when used at the beginning of a line).

Building and installing¶

You use bentomaker to build and install bento packages. Its interface is similar to autotools:

bentomaker configure --prefix=somedirectory
bentomaker install

If you are fine with default configuration values, you can install in one step:

bentomaker install

bentomaker will automatically determine which commands need to be re-run. You can check where bento install files with the –list-files option (in which case bento does not install anything):

bentomaker install --list-files

Bentomaker contains a basic help facility, which list existing commands, etc...:

bentomaker help commands # list commands

From existing setup.py (convertion from distutils-based projects)¶

Bentomaker has an experimental convert command to convert an existing setup.py:

bentomaker convert

If successfull, it will write a bento.info file whose content is derived from your setup.py. The convert command is inherently fragile, because it has to hook into distutils/setuptools internals. Nevertheless, it has been used succesfully to convert packages such as Sphinx or Jinja.