table continued parameter description maintainer maintainer_email url maintainer' name maintainer' email home page for the package short description of the package long description of the package location where package can be downloaded list of string classifiers description long_description download_url classifiers creating setup py file is enough to create source distribution of your software type the following shell command to make source distributionpython setup py sdist this creates an archive file such as spam- tar gz or spam- zip in the directory spam/dist this is the file you would give to others to install your software to installa user simply unpacks the archive and performs these stepsunzip spam- zip cd spam- python setup py install this installs the software into the local python distribution and makes it available for general use modules and packages are normally installed into directory called "site-packagesin the python library to find the exact location of this directoryinspect the value of sys path scripts are normally installed into the same directory as the python interpreter on unix-based systems or into "scriptsdirectory on windows (found in " :\python \scriptsin typical installationon unixif the first line of script starts with #and contains the text "python"the installer will rewrite the line to point to the local installation of python thusif you have written scripts that have been hard-coded to specific python location such as /usr/local/bin/pythonthey should still work when installed on other systems where python is in different location the setup py file has number of other commands concerning the distribution of software if you type 'python setup py bdist' binary distribution is created in which all of the py files have already been precompiled into pyc files and placed into directory structure that mimics that of the local platform this kind of distribution is needed only if parts of your application have platform dependencies (for exampleif you also have extensions that need to be compiledif you run 'python setup py bdist_wininston windows machinean exe file will be created when openeda windows installer dialog will startprompting the user for information about where the software should be installed this kind of distribution also adds entries to the registrymaking it easy to uninstall your package at later date the distutils module assumes that users already have python installation on their machine (downloaded separatelyalthough it is possible to create software packages where the python runtime and your software are bundled together into single lib fl ff