lost interest?

[Alex Martelli]

On Tuesday 11 December 2001 19:23, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     >> CPAN is marvelous.  The way the Perl and Python communities
>     >> operate, it fills a niche perfectly in the Perl world, but I think
>     >> would be a bit of a solution looking for a problem in the Python
>     >> world.
>
>     Alex> If it encourages more reuse of code in module A by the author
> of Alex> module B, I think it would be a VERY good influence "in the
> Python Alex> world".  Why *shouldn't* the useful 3rd-party modules we use
> be Alex> free to rely on other useful 3rd-party modules yet?!
>
> Python authors are free to rely on any modules they like, third-party or
> otherwise.  That they don't suggests to me that there's generally fairly
> little need to do that, at least for widely used packages.

To me, it suggests something different: that authors are duplicating 
functionality or doing without it rather than reusing, say, mx.DateTime or 
other packages offering low-level, reusable functionality -- because nobody 
wants their distributed packages to be harder to install and use, and 
therefore less frequently used, by requiring dependencies on others without 
a cpan-ish infrastructure in place.

We'll only know after 2-3 years that a Cpan-ish infrastructure becomes 
working (if ever): if at that point the dependencies remain as low as 
they're today, then you were right, and encouraging reuse is not among the 
advantages.  I'm ready to bet a good lunch at Bologna's best restaurant, 
wine included, that dependencies will become much more common, i.e., that 
reuse will indeed have been encouraged.


Alex