[Numpy-discussion] [matplotlib-devel] Announcing toydist, improving distribution and packaging situation

[Robert Kern]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 17:42, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 4:23 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>> What I do -- and documented for people in my lab to do -- is set up
>>> one virtualenv in my user account, and use it as my default python. (I
>>> 'activate' it from my login scripts.) The advantage of this is that
>>> easy_install (or pip) just works, without any hassle about permissions
>>> etc.
>>
>> It just works if you happen to be able to build everything from
>> sources. That alone means you ignore the majority of users I intend to
>> target.
>>
>> No other community (except maybe Ruby) push those isolated install
>> solutions as a general deployment solutions. If it were such a great
>> idea, other people would have picked up those solutions.
>
> AFAICT, R works more-or-less identically (once I convinced it to use a
> per-user library directory); install.packages() builds from source,
> and doesn't automatically pull in and build random C library
> dependencies.

That's not quite the same. That is the R equivalent of Python's recent
per-user site-packages feature (every user get's their own sandbox),
not virtualenv (every project gets it's own sandbox). The former
feature has a long history in the multiuser UNIX world and is not
really controversial.

  http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco