Python -- (just) a successful experiment?

[Robert Kern]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> 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.

Java I'll give you (but then, lots of people are paid to make it that 
way). Fedora is an OS, not a language. GCC does not come with a standard 
GUI or even many libraries, so I don't see why it's in this list. Ruby 
on Rails does *not* give you a sumo distribution like you are talking 
about and I have maintained. It does provide a single installer for Ruby 
on Rails (which is just a web framework) and its dependencies for a few 
platforms so that people new to Ruby can give Ruby on Rails a try 
without doing a big installation dance. When people start really 
developing Ruby on Rails apps, they're going to be using the RubyGems 
installers. The installer you're talking about is really just for 
evaluation.

Ruby on Rails's main strategy for distribution, RubyGems, is *exactly* 
what I'm suggesting: packages.

>>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?

<shrug> I have 60 GB on my laptop and lots of music and gigabyte-sized 
satellite images so disk space is relatively tight. You're making my 
point: everyone has different needs.

>>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.  

Fedora Core is an operating system, so it pretty much *needs* to be 
installed from some physical medium at some point in the process. It is 
also a very popular operating system, so pressing and mailing DVDs is 
relatively economical.

Doing these large, "everything on one CD/DVD," deals is really the 
province of operating system distributions, and they do the job well. 
Package management is where we on the Python end ought to focus.

>>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.

Which is exactly why I said at the beginning that people shouldn't 
bother with this thread and should instead just get to work.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
  Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
   -- Richard Harter