[Distutils] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you

[David Cournapeau]

Greg Ewing wrote:
>
> That looks interesting, but I'm not sure I'd quite
> call it "something like". It looks like another case
> of adding more complexity to fight existing complexity,
> rather than removing the original complexity.
>

You won't be able to remove the initial complexity, because it is a 
feature. Honestly, one of the thing which annoys me the most when I have 
to use mac os X or windows is the lack of package management.

Now, I don't think the situation on linux is ideal either. There are 
some technical issues, and some social issues; the worst thing to do is 
to find a technical solution to a social problem, so it is important to 
separate the two kinds, I think. On windows, most windows developers, as 
I understand it, do not have a strong need for package manager because 
they have almost everything they want with visual studio and MS dev 
tools. On a new linux machine, I may do apt-get install devtools. On 
windows, I run setup.exe for VS, plus the full Windows SDK. In a way, 
they do the same thing: providing everything a developer may need with 
as little hassle as possible for the developer (compilers, api, sdk, 
docs, etc... in a way which such as all the disparate things work together).

> In other words, it seems to be just another package
> manager, albeit a particulary nice-sounding one.

There are two ways of looking at it, I think. One is to think that linux 
FHS (and unix in general) is totally broken. I personally really like 
how gobo linux tries to go around that:

http://www.gobolinux.org/

It is like stow on steroids: I try to avoid installing anything from 
sources which is not handled through stow, and gobolinux just go one 
step further (quite a big step).

The other one is to say disk space is cheap, just bundle everything (ala 
mac os X). 0install is a partial solution. There are also projects like 
klik or glick (done by a Red Had employer), which may be more similar to 
what you are after:

Note that mac os X is a combination of the two in some ways.

cheers,

David