[Python-Dev] Paul Prescod: add Expat to 1.6

[Jack Jansen]

Recently, Skip Montanaro <skip@mojam.com> said:
> 
>     Andrew> My personal leaning is that we can get more bang for the buck by
>     Andrew> working on the Distutils effort, so that installing a package
>     Andrew> like PyExpat becomes much easier, rather than piling more things
>     Andrew> into the core distribution.
> 
> Amen to that.  See Guido's note and my response regarding soundex in the
> Doc-SIG.  Perhaps you could get away with a very small core distribution
> that only contained the stuff necessary to pull everything else from the net 
> via http or ftp...

I don't know whether this subject belongs on the python-dev list (is
there a separate distutils list?), but let's please be very careful
with this. The Perl people apparently think that their auto-install
stuff is so easy to use that if you find a tool on the net that needs
Perl they'll just give you a few incantations you need to build the
"correct" perl to run the tool, but I've never managed to do so. My
last try was when I spent 2 days to try and get the perl-based Palm
software for unix up and running. With various incompatilble versions
of perl installed in /usr/local by the systems staff and knowing
nothing about perl I had to give up at some point, because it was
costing far more time (and diskspace:-) than the whole thing was
worth.

Something like mailman is (afaik) easy to install for non-pythoneers
because it only depends on a single, well-defined Python distribution.
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