Python 2.4 killing commercial Windows Python development ?

[Roger Binns]

"Stefan Behnel" <behnel_ml at gkec.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote in message news:d3vscb$i8r$1 at lnx107.hrz.tu-darmstadt.de...
>
> Roger Binns schrieb:
>> As far as I can tell, they failed at two hurdles.  One is that there
>> is a new BitPim release every two weeks and they can't really keep up
>> with that.  (eg it takes around two weeks for packages with a lot of
>> attention on Gentoo to become stable and often is a lot longer)
>
> This is why many open source projects include (possibly outdated) .spec files directly in their tree. Makes it easy to just adapt 
> them and run rpmbuild. Similar for Debian package specs.

Funnily enough there is an ebuild file in the BitPim source.  However
it has to be munged for each release since Gentoo requires the ebuild
filename to include the version number.  I don't bother releasing that
file due to the onerous non-automated SourceForge file upload process.
(And many of the dependencies aren't in Portage anyway so this would
have to be quite a number of ebuilds).

> With Python sources it is even easier (most of the time) since you can run
> python setup.py bdist_rpm
> which spits out a readily baken RPM, ready to be nailed into the system. Sadly, this doesn't exist for Debian and it doesn't work 
> for all Python packages (Twisted, that is).

The distutils approach is mainly useful for packages and libraries,
not for applications.  And of course it still has the prerequisites
issues mentioned earlier.

Roger