Configuring a package with distutils

Let's see a simple example of distutils. We'll create a basic setup.py installation script for the palindrome module we wrote in the Chapter 11, Debugging with PDB.

The first thing we want to do is to create a directory to hold our project. Let's call this palindrome:

$ mkdir palindrome
$ cd palindrome

Let's put a copy of our palindrome.py in this directory:

"""palindrome.py - Detect palindromic integers"""

import unittest

def digits(x):
    """Convert an integer into a list of digits.

    Args:
      x: The number whose digits we want.

    Returns: A list of the digits, in order, of ``x``.

    >>> digits(4586378)
    [4, 5, 8, 6, 3, 7, 8]
    """

    digs = []
    while x != 0:
        div, mod = divmod(x, 10)
        digs.append(mod)
        x = div
    return digs...