CPAN for python?

[Christian Tismer]

Randall Hopper wrote:
> 
> Andrew Kuchling:
...
>  |So, what would people want on top of distutils?  A Debian-style "do
>  |apt-get, upgrade" to update currently installed packages?  A
>  |CPAN-style "fetch and install this module for me, please"?  Simple
>  |version checking?
> 
> Someday, hopefully:
> 
>          setup.py install
> 
> or some tool will fetch, build, and install, not just the module dist, but
> all of its dependencies too.
> 
> I guess I've been spoiled by the FreeBSD ports system.  Fetch the small
> port for a package and just kick off "make install".  Under the hood, it
> fetches source dists from ftp/www sites, and patches, configures, builds,
> and installs the package _and_ all its dependent packages, all
> automagically.  Simple (particularly good for the newbies).

Sounds great.
Do you have an idea how they handle the security
part of the game?
If this kind of thing, with multiple ftp servers involved
and scripts in several packages being auto-called, gets
tampered by a moderate level hacker, (s)he could do quite
everything nasty.

> Wonder if Python could have something similar.  Folks could post URLs to a
> "getit.py" (or setup.py) script, and users could literally cut-and-paste
> this URL into a Python install tool that would just "do the install".  That
> is, don't bother them with where to FTP or surf, how to get the files,
> where to put the packages, what the name of the distdir in the tarball is,
> etc.  Just install the package and do what it takes to make it happen.
> That'd be cool.

And it would be cool to host this service on the new
Starship site which is being built at the moment.
The machine is very powerful.

ciao - chris

-- 
Christian Tismer             :^)   <mailto:tismer at appliedbiometrics.com>
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