From jafo@tummy.com Mon Jul 8 07:03:35 2002 From: jafo@tummy.com (Sean Reifschneider) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 00:03:35 -0600 Subject: [Catalog-sig] What can I do? Message-ID: <20020708000335.P1749@tummy.com> >I'd really like to see PEP 243 come to something. What can I do to make it >happen? I can offer my programming time, and a test server. I can also Unfortunately, there IS no technological solution to this problem. We have programming talent, in fact my "swalow" code was a working system, I have a server here which we can run swalow or Ciphon's code on -- Suchandra even has a login on it and an FTP directory to play around in. The problem is one of gaining critical mass. There are a few reasons for this, I think. AMK seemed to indicate he lost interest in the catalog efforts because Debian has packages for all the stuff he needs. I was also having trouble finding someone in the Debian camp to get interested in making Distutils inter-operate with Debian packages -- the opinion I've gotten was that unless a Debian package came from a human maintainer, Debian folks didn't want it around. I thought that making a distutils command-line switch which automatically uploaded packages to the repository would help gain that critical mass. It never made it into the Distutils base-line. There's been some recent discussion of putting it in place, but I haven't had the time to get back in to Distutils to make it happen. I think it boils down to this: What we have is "good enough". The standard Python library is pretty rich, and many distributions include the more important packages. So, the need for having it isn't a "pressing issue". Most of the good stuff is readily available. > 1. module namespace. PAUSE has facility for authors to register namespaces to >avoid clashes. Yes, this definitely hasn't been addressed. Nor has the ability to deal with maintainers. I think some sort of signature system is going to have to be in place so that package owners can upload packages, and builders can build binaries off of it, but trying to prevent forged copies of things from getting out. > 2. auto-install. Ciphon has done work on this and looks good. I haven't really looked at Ciphon. I presume it can install RPMs on RPM systems, which still leaves Debian out in the cold. I'm quite sure, after my experience with CPAN, that integrating with the local package system is important. PEP243 was actually written after I demonstrated my Swalow code at Python 9, and based on the discussion at the Catalog-SIG discussion at the conference. So, it was actually meant to be some of the back-end to make the auto-install of Swalow happen. So, how would you make this happen? Sean -- You know you're in Canada when: The weather reports starts with "All temperatures are degrees below zero unless otherwise stated." Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python From rob@uselesspython.com Thu Jul 18 14:27:08 2002 From: rob@uselesspython.com (Rob) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:27:08 -0500 Subject: [Catalog-sig] test Message-ID: new member testing settings please ignore test message