[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:20 PM 11/24/2005 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>Le jeudi 24 novembre 2005 à 10:14 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> > At 01:44 PM 11/24/2005 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > >They only introduce more complexity, instead of bringing real features.
> >
> > Please read the hundreds of kilobytes of messages I've already posted on
> > this thread
>
>I've read them. All of them. You're only babbling about how eggs are
>great, instead of explaining what problem they are trying to solve.

No, what's happening is that you're not paying attention, because you 
believe that Debian already solves those problems, even though it doesn't 
solve them for Python developers who want their projects to be usable on 
every platform.  You're also ignoring my repeated explanations about how 
plugins work, and why Debian doesn't help with that problem either.

And finally, and most importantly, you're ignoring the fact that this 
discussion began because a Debian developer wanted to package a successful 
egg-using project and its dependencies.  Nobody came to you asking for your 
blessing to package eggs or your approval of how useful eggs are; somebody 
came and asked me for help in getting this to work with Debian.  Help which 
I've been giving.

For some reason, however, you seem to think that you are actually in a 
position to pass judgment on the usefulness of eggs.  If their usefulness 
were in any meaningful question, we wouldn't be having this conversation in 
the first place!

I've been answering Martin's posts to kill FUD and to make progress where 
progress could be made.  But your posts aren't spreading any FUD I haven't 
already answered, and you're clearly not interested in making any progress, 
so I don't see any point in wasting either of our time any further on this 
thread.  Nonetheless, I remain committed to helping any system integrator - 
Debian included - in helping their users by allowing them to satisfy egg 
dependencies using their existing packages, as well as in packaging 
egg-based projects in ways that work, not only for the project, but for the 
system integrator.

In other words, setuptools 0.6a9 will have the features that at least 
Martin and Matthias have suggested will be an acceptable solution for 
packaging projects that explicitly contain egg metadata (such as 
FormEncode), and will also allow older Python packages to add dependency 
metadata with a single empty file.  While I'm not a party to any Debian 
policy decisions regarding whether these features will be used for which 
packages and when, I will nonetheless be happy to continue offering 
technical input on these matters upon request.

Luckily, the overall discussion has been productive despite the 
rancor.  I've learned quite a lot that will be useful.