Squisher -- a lightweight, self-contained alternative to eggs?

[Stef Mientki]

Adam Atlas wrote:
> Ah... heh, sorry, I misread your message as "a much more convenient
> way" rather than "much more than a convenient way". Anyway, I
> understand that, and I do indeed find setuptools useful and use it on
> a regular basis.
> 
> But my other points still stand. This would be a moot point if
> setuptools were part of the standard library, but it's not, and I
> don't see why people should have to bother installing it if they
> simply want to try a small package. Look at Beautiful Soup, for
> example. It's distributed as a single .py file, and that's great. With
> most modules, all I want to do is download them and plop them into my
> project directory. You can always copy it into site-packages if you
> want to access it globally, and you can always unzip it if you need to
> see the source.
> 
> So I *will* retract my statement that this could be an "alternative"
> to eggs -- ideally, it would be an addition, since it doesn't break
> compatibility at all. You could download an egg and rename it to .pyc,
> and import it like any other module, and at any point later, you could
> rename it back to .egg and use setuptools to install it if you wish.
> 
Good point to make these things much easier!

But possibly I'm the only Windows user here,
as I still find these talks all very difficult to understand,
and I really don't understand why all this complexity is necessary,
setuptools ? eggs ? zips ? pythonpaths ?

As a normal Windows user,
   I'm used to run an install file,
     and hit just 1 button.
As a normal Windows programmer,
   I'm used to create a simple Inno-setup file,
     and my users can behave as a simplistic and happy Windows user.

But I guess the needed complexity is all thanks to NIX ;-)

I think I never would have started with Python,
if I didn't bounced into the Enthought-edition.

-- 
cheers,
Stef Mientki
http://pic.flappie.nl