[Distutils] [Python-Dev] How we can get rid of eggs for 2.6 and beyond

[Paul Moore]

On 22/03/2008, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> Well, I've probably been killfiled into non-existence on this list by
>  now, but it seems to me that we are in danger of answering the wrong
>  problem yet again. But that's all I have to say on this topic, so you
>  can all heave a sigh a relief and get on with messing it up ;-)

You probably have my company in the killfile, but I have a nagging
feeling in the same direction. My biggest problem is that I can't
express what I believe is the *right* problem, beyond the over-general
statement that it seems crucial to me that there should be a single,
unified way of managing *all* packages installed in a given Python
installation. Whether that's a Python-only solution, or the system
packager, doesn't matter. There should be only one way to do it, to
reuse a well-known phrase :-)

If you know how to state nature of the right problem, that would be useful.

All this talk of "playing nicely with the system packager" seems to
imply that people are designing a second solution, and trying to
manage the interaction, rather than deciding on *one* solution (which
by definition has no interaction to worry about).

It's reasonable to have multiple solutions for multiple Python
installations (system packager for the system python, python packager
for a local install, for example) but that's a different matter.

Oh, and application installation is (should be) completely different.
On Windows, applications should probably be bundled with their own
Python interpreter, a la py2exe. On Unix/Linux, I don't know what the
standard is, so I'd have to defer to others.

Paul.