[Distutils] GUI for Python package Management

[david.lyon at preisshare.net]

Hi Leonardo,

> I don't think that the missing of a gui is what is the problem today
> for python. Package uninstall is something that bothers some (maybe a
> lot) of users. 

Yeah. Me too. Possibly made easier by having a GUI.

> Another point is to have something like webstart for
> java. If I understand how it works, running an application goes like
> this: If you open an app and it depends on another package not
> installed on your system java goes around and download the missing
> modules for you (and stores them in a relative place to the package or
> the user package dir) so the application can run. This would be cool
> for python, the problem being that there is no security to guarantee
> that those modules are not malicious in any way...

I agree with that strongly.

In my travels, I have just come across PyPI. Which seems like a sort of
CPAN. It seems to have a good base of packages. I am not sure if that is
competitive to distutils or not, but would like to know.

Following is some code I could incorporate into the GUI:

    PyPI's XML-RPC methods

    Example usage:

    >>> import xmlrpclib
    >>> server = xmlrpclib.Server('http://pypi.python.org/pypi')
    >>> server.package_releases('roundup')
    ['1.1.2']
    >>> server.search('roundup', '1.1.2')

> That is it, I would not opose to have a gui to install python modules,
> but I couldn't care less for one. There are a lot more pressing
> matters in the distutils/setuptools part of the python env than a gui.

hmm... I am kindof the reverse. :-) Not keen to work on the code behind the
scenes only keen to have some gui. 

Hey, thanks. Very informative. Hope I can do something.

David