Python does not play well with others

[Paul Boddie]

Jorge Godoy wrote:
> "Paul Boddie" <paul at boddie.org.uk> writes:
>
> > And while Python eggs may be useful for people managing additional
> > software as some unprivileged user, hosting providers (and virtual
> > private server administrators) will want packages that fit in with the
> > rest of the software being managed in the hosting environment.
>
> And why eggs wouldn't satisfy them?  Eggs can be installed globally as well,
> making the package available to every client of this hosting server (if they
> mount their libs from a unique NFS server then it would automatically be
> available for all of their servers).

Because Python is just another thing to support for various hosting
providers. One of the problems people supposedly have when persuading
such companies to add or update packages is, I imagine, a lack of
familiarity those companies have with Python technologies. Asking them
to use a technology-specific packaging system might be a bit much if
they aren't even familiar with (or interesting in knowing more about)
the packages required to satisfy their customers' basic needs.

Moreover, there's a lot of software in the average GNU/Linux or BSD
distribution, but if you had to "break out" into technology-specific
package/dependency managers to install some of the more heterogeneous
packages, it would be a nightmare: perhaps installing the
documentation would have you visit CPAN for some Perl scripts before
throwing you into the TeX package manager to get some missing TeX
libraries; then you might be off into setuptools for the Python
scripting extensions, possibly via equivalent tools for other
scripting extensions; finally, you'd be off via any other system
thought essential to manage software from a particular parochial
technological viewpoint. I've had to install software like this, and
it takes huge amounts of time for no good reason if you can use system
packages instead.

Paul