Python -- (just) a successful experiment?

[Paul Rubin]

Robert Kern <rkern at ucsd.edu> writes:
> As a maintainers of a convenient unified distro, I have to say that
> it's a losing strategy. No matter how much you include, for every
> person that tells you, "Thank you, you've made my Python experience
> better," there are three who say, "Thanks, but could you also include
> Package X?" or "Thanks, but Package Y is much better at doing foo than
> Package Z? Could you include it next time?" or "When are you going to
> update Package W to the latest version?"

It doesn't appear to be a losing strategy for Java, Fedora, GCC, or
for that matter Ruby on Rails.  Maybe it's more work, but those
distros are able to attract enough community effort and/or corporate
bucks to get the work done.

> You can't satisfy everyone or even a whole lot of people with a single
> massive installer. People want different things. I want VTK installed
> because I need 3D visualization; I couldn't care less about web
> applications. But lots of other people care very deeply about web
> applications and don't want to waste 100 MB of disk space on 3D
> visualization libraries.

If I have a 400GB hard disk in my computer, why should I care whether
it's 99.5% empty instead of 99 empty after I get done installing
software?

> When "one-click installation" entails downloading 150 MB of compressed
> data for every update, the convenience begins to pall a bit.

Fedora Core is around 4GB and I installed it from a DVD-ROM pretty
easily.  

> Fortunately, there's a better approach, and it's coming soon. The next
> iteration of MacEnthon, at least, is going to be based on Python eggs
> and easy_install.py. Python eggs are, more or less, Python's answer to
> Ruby's gems.
> 
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs

Cool.  That doc page compares them to .jar files, but I don't see any
provision for signatures on them like jars have.  I hope that can be
added sometime.