Package problem

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:45 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:35 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at preisshare.net>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 May 2009 13:53:18 +0900, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> >> Given that nobody has managed to solve this problem, I doubt you will
> >> find a solution.
> >
> > It is solved in other languages.. for example perl.. and delphi
>
> I don't know much about perl, and even less about delphi, but I am
> pretty sure it does not solve the problem of overwriting files from a
> package with an installation outside the control of the package
> manager.
>
> There is no simple solution to the following situation:
>   - install setuptools from ubuntu -> files get into /usr
> (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages, etc...)
>   - install setuptools from sources into /usr: overwrite files from
> the python-setuptools debian package, with an updated version which is
> not compatible with the packaged one -> every Ubuntu package depending
> on setuptools is now broken. Worse, it may not be possible to rollback
> to a working situation.
>
> To make it work, you would have to somehow notify the package
> management system about the updated version. But still, the whole
> value of a package manager is to have a whole set of packages which
> are tested together. Updating packages 'randomly' from 3rd party
> sources is inherently against this.
>

Actually, the point in the package manager is to handle updates and
uninstalls gracefully. As long as you stick with using the package manager,
everything should be handled fine regardless of whether you're using an
official repository, a third party repository (wxPython has its own), or a
downloaded debian package (such as with OpenOffice).


> > Fight it ??? I didn't even get a python interpreter with my operating
> > system...
> >
> > So there's no possible way I can be against it...
>
> By fighting, I meant that because OS don't always have uptodate
> packages you want to depend on, trying to implement a system to update
> the packages is backward. The problem is depending on those recent
> libraries in the first place if you want to run on many
> configurations.
>

I think other-David was talking about Windows here. Which is completely
irrelevant to this thread about easy_install vs. a system package manager.
Mostly, he was just trying to plug for his own project.


>
> cheers,
>
> David
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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