Python evolution: Unease

[Paul Rubin]

Roman Suzi <rnd at onego.ru> writes:
> I do not like the idea of having stubs. Once I had an experience working with
> CPAN (I tried to install SpamAssassin and it required some specific modules.)
> "Magic" install shell, provided by Perl, upgraded half the Perl distro,
> including newer version of Perl!
> 
> So, I do like Python distutils better. it is not a major problem to
> install something even if it required something else. Of course,
> this depends on the package authors.

But distutils don't help the problem that the module requires stuff
that's missing.  That's what happened with the thing I downloaded last
week, that needed wxPython.  I don't understand why the author felt he
had to use wxPython instead of tkinter, since it wasn't a really fancy
gui, but after already-described hassles trying to instead wxPython, I
just used the application's command line interface instead, which
worked fine.  But if wxPython is so much better, maybe it's time for
Python to include it.

I want to start using Audacity pretty soon, which I think really does
depend on wxPython, so I'm going to have to deal with this wxPython
installation problem which is definitely not completely trivial.  What
a pain.  

> Yes, probably there could be a no-brainer script to run install
> directly from zip and/or tar.gz/bz2 file, but I usually check
> md5, pgp sigs and look inside anyway before running something.

I thought distutils doesn't have any code-signing features.