lost interest?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Chris> Justin Sheehy wrote:
    >> I'd ask a different question from yours.  Why is it a problem that
    >> Python doesn't have an equivalent to CPAN?  ... it has to pose enough
    >> of a problem in its absence that those people will have real
    >> motivation to make it happen.

    Chris> A big problem I have seen is people not wanting to use exactly
    Chris> the module they really nedd because it is "not part of the
    Chris> standard distirubion". If it was a whole lot easier to find, get
    Chris> and install third-party packages, perhaps this concern would go
    Chris> away.

I do a little Perl programming under the guise of using Mason.  I find CPAN
indispensible for a few reasons:

    * It appears that more of what the Python distribution calls "core"
      modules are distributed separate from Perl proper.

    * I don't know my way around the Perl world very well.  

    * Perl's third-party modules tend to rely heavily on other third-party
      modules for their proper functioning, so CPAN's ability to register
      and handle inter-module dependencies is important.

If I take a peek into the python2.1/site-packages directory of
manatee.mojam.com, a machine that I have been working on heavily the past
week or so, I see these third-party modules:

    csv
    mx
    TextFile
    MySQLdb
    timeoutsocket
    PIL

The only interdependency there is between MySQLdb and mx.DateTime, and
that's a "soft" dependency.  MySQLdb will adapt and work without mx.DateTime
present.  I don't know precisely how many third-party Perl packages I've
installed to work with Mason (I only use a half dozen or so directly), but
/root/.cpan on manatee currently contains the source for 32 packages and
it's near the 25MB disk space limit I placed on it, so I'm sure other
packages have been purged.

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.

The one feature that would be useful in the Python world is the 'i'nfo
command.  That seems to me to be handled pretty well by the Vaults of
Parnassus.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)

P.S. Chris, I see you're another recent "convert" from Excite at Home to AT&T
Broadband... ;-)