[Distutils] Beyond wheels 1.0: helping downstream, FHS and more

[Chris Barker]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Kevin Horn <kevin.horn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Personally, I'm not a fan of auto-installing,
>
>

> I'm with Paul on this one.  It seems to me that auto-installing the
> extension would destroy most of the advantages of distributing the
> extensions separately.
>

Exactly -- I actually tossed that one out there because I wanted to know
what folks were thinking, but also a bit of bait ;-) -- we've got a
conflict here:

1) These possible extensions are potentially dangerous, etc, and should be
well reviewed and not just tossed in there.

2) People (and I'm one of them) really, really want "pip install" to "just
work". (or conda install or enpkg, or...). If it's going to "just work",
then it needs to find and install the extensions auto-magically, and then
we're really not very far from running arbitrary code...

Would that be that different than the fact that installing a given package
automatically installs all sorts of other packages -- and most of us don't
give that a good review before running install...

(I just was showing off Shinx to a class last night -- quite amazing what
gets brought in with a pip install of sphinx (including pytz -- I have no
idea why). But at the end of the day, I don't care much either. I'm
trusting that the Sphinx folks aren't doing something ridiculous or
dangerous.

Which brings us back to the "review of extensions" thing -- I think it's
less about the end user checking it out and making a decision about it, but
about the package builder doing that. I have a package I want to be easy to
install on Windows -- so I go look for an extension that does the Start
Menu, etc. Indeed, that kind of thing "'should" be part of pip and/or
wheel, but it would probably be more successful if it were done as third
party extensions -- perhaps over the years, the ones that rise to the top
of usefulness can become standards.

-Chris

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
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