[Distutils] Python people want CPAN and how the latter came about

[ssteinerX@gmail.com]

On Dec 26, 2009, at 7:15 AM, Laura Creighton wrote:

>  Right now I don't know any way to say 'under no circumstances,
> ever, let easy_install near my code because it will do very bad things
> to it'.

Uh...I think you just did.

> I liked things a whole lot better when pypi was about being a package
> index, and _only_ about being a package index, and where those people
> who had ideas about improving the user experience were free to go out
> there and write their own programs to do the same, but where none of
> these has any sort of 'official recognition' and where, of course,
> others who didn't want that sort of experience were free to
> ignore the whole thing.

I think that, in the whole CPAN-ification of PyPI discussion, an absurd amount feature creep has come into the discussion.   I think the ratings discussion was the tiny crystal that started the whole gigantic snowball.

At the bottom of everything CPAN's repository is just a glorified, rsync-able FTP site with a bunch of stuff in directories.  Everything on top of that is window dressing.

The PyPI discussions seem to be tending toward mixing the window dressing with the framing, to use a building analogy, and what that will result in is a weak frame and ugly windows.  A building that slowly (or quickly) falls down under its own weight, and looks bad doing it.

I think that splitting 

	> package storage and pointers to off-repository storage (for those who don't upload to PyPI)
	> metadata about the stored packages
	> tools for creating stored packages
	> tools for retrieving stored packages
	> tools for installing packages

would go a long way towards unobfuscating this whole discussion.

Yes, I'm sure someone will disagree with some fine-point of that division but isn't that what  woodshedding is all about?

S