[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:52 PM 11/25/2005 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>It could do it by simply trying to import the module.

Python's import mechanism is fragile in the presence of failed imports that 
aren't explicitly trapped, and in Python 2.3 it's even more fragile because 
only the *first* attempt to import a module that has a missing dependency 
will fail; subsequent imports of that module will return a broken 
module.  Diagnosing such problems is non-trivial.


> > 2) check if it can find this dep like setuptools does today (installing 
> them
> > as eggs somewhere in the user's home)
>
>I consider this as a security risk. I hope this can be disabled by
>default.

It *is*.  You have to explicitly run easy_install or setup.py to get any 
installation of any software, or use an explicit application feature like 
Trac's "upload a plugin" facility.  And I don't agree with Vincenzo's 
proposal to make easy_install run apt-get in any case.  If you want to 
fetch debs to satisfy a non-Debian Python project, you should use 
easy_deb.  Using easy_install only makes sense if you are using 
bleeding-edge stuff installed to your home directory or a special project 
directory, so you don't want to fetch any debs in that case because you're 
not updating the *system* packages.