[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 10:00 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 10:49 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:47 PM, Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On 21 September 2012 18:15, Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > This sounds great. A few others I usually put in a fresh install.
>> >> >
>> >> > mpmath
>> >> > sphinx
>> >>
>> >> I don't know about mpmath. I probably wouldn't include Sphinx in the
>> >> spec, as it's important more when you're developing and releasing
>> >> packages. But it does return us to the question about general-purpose
>> >> Python packages. Should we require distribute, for example - or just
>> >> specify that there must be a package installation mechanism? What
>> >> about popular tools like requests? Or things like GUI toolkits that
>> >> are difficult to install separately? Although PyQt would rather
>> >> increase the minimum size.
>> >
>> >
>> > I like the idea of trying to emulate something like R's install.package
>> > (eventually). This, to me, is one of the reasons it's so successful. The
>> > target audience, as I think it is for pylab, is users - people that are
>> > proficient at writing scripts and generally smart problem solvers but
>> > not
>> > necessarily extremely great programmers. For example, I don't think
>> > there's
>> > an assumption that the average R user has working knowledge of how to
>> > build
>> > a package from scratch. Developers, on the other hand, don't need too
>> > much
>> > hand holding to get the other tools they need - e.g., compilers, sphinx
>> > probably falls in here, etc. If having things like distribute in the
>> > package
>> > helps move us in this direction (would it?), then I think that's a good
>> > argument for including it.
>>
>> I don't think distribute (which is just setuptools with a different
>> set of bugs) is a solution to any problem we are facing. I agree R
>> install.package is a killer feature. FWIW, that has always been part
>> of what I want to achieve with bento (I spent quite a bit of time
>> around R system when annoucing what would become bento at scipy india
>> in 2009).
>
>
> So how far off is bentoshop?

Pretty far, but closer than 3 years ago :) I was merely pointing out
that getting there will be difficult, and should IMO be orthogonal to
the discussion.

David