[Python-Dev] [Distutils] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 11:52:08PM +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
> And I would say that Windows doesn't have a problem. Are any Windows
> users proposing building a package management system for Windows
> (Python-specific or otherwise)? It's a genuine question - is this
> something that Windows users are after, or is it just Linux users
> trying to show Windows users what they are missing?

Well, users don't phrase this that way, because they don't know what
package management (or rather automatic dependency tracking) is, but yes,
they are some usecases. It is nowadays really tedious to deploy Python
applications making uses of many packages on Python.

The scientific community is a domain in which this problem is crucial, as
we are trying to ship desktop applications to non-computer-savy people,
with many dependencies outside the standard library.

Enthought is working on shipping a Python distribution with some sort of
package management for this purpose ( see
http://code.enthought.com/enstaller/ ), and finding it is not an easy
problem.

Cheers,

Gael