eggs considered harmful

[Paul Boddie]

Fuzzyman wrote:
>
> I understand your situation and I have some misgivings myself. It
> reminds me of the time when I worked in a 'corporate environment' and
> I was trying to install a Perl application to get round the internet
> blocking.
>
> The application (localproxy - very good) was *intended* to be
> installed via CPAN for tracking requirements - which didn't work
> behind our proxy firewall.

Sounds like an "interesting" bootstrapping issue to me.

[...]

> My guess is that a lot of the world's computers are behind firewalls
> or proxies that preclude automatic dependency resolution.

I'd argue that mechanisms already exist for automatic upgrades even in
restricted environments, and we're not always talking about "big
bucks" corporate solutions, either. Indeed, the more established GNU/
Linux distributions seem to have had the required flexibility of
dependency resolution *and* not requiring an "always on" connection to
the Internet for quite some time - for obvious reasons if you consider
how long they've been going.

> *However*, there is a very good reason why setuptools and eggs are
> gaining in popularity (and will continue to do so). For the majority
> of users eggs are just *so damned convenient*. Being able to do
> ``easy_install some_project`` and have it just work is fantastic.

Sure. But being able to install any software (not just eggs via the
Package Index, or Perl software via CPAN, or...) with dependency
resolution isn't alien to a lot of people. Again, it's time to look at
established practice rather than pretend it doesn't exist:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-November/070101.html

Paul