ubuntu dist-packages

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Diez B. Roggisch<deets at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> Paul Boddie wrote:
>
>> On 26 Aug, 17:48, Jorgen Grahn <grahn+n... at snipabacken.se> wrote:
>>>
>>> Well, if you are thinking about Debian Linux, it's not as much
>>> "ripping out" as "splitting into a separate package with a non-obvious
>>> name". Annoying at times, but hardly an atrocity.
>>
>> Indeed. Having seen two packages today which insisted on setuptools,
>> neither really needing it, and with one actively trying to download
>> stuff from the Internet (fifteen seconds warning - how generous!) when
>> running setup.py, it seems to me that it isn't the distribution
>> packagers who need to be re-thinking how they install Python software.
>>
>> Generally, distributions have to manage huge amounts of software and
>> uphold reasonable policies without creating unnecessary maintenance.
>> Sadly, until very recently (and I'm still not entirely sure if there's
>> really been an attitude change) the Pythonic packaging brigade has
>> refused to even consider the needs of one of the biggest groups of
>> consumers of the upstream code. Consequently, distributions will
>> always devise different ways of storing installed Python software,
>> documentation and resources, mostly because the Pythonic tools have
>> been deficient, particularly in the management of the latter
>> categories.
>
> You mean it's the problem of the python packaging that it can't deal with
> RPMs, debs, tgzs, OSX bundles, MSIs and
> <put-in-the-next-big-packaging-thing-here>?

Of course it is - not because distutils should know about them but on
the contrary because it should be possible to tweak the installation
parameters to accomodate the various packaging solutions. Autotools,
cmake, etc... do not need anything about rpm, debian, msi, and yet,
they can be used to that purpose.

cheers,

David