[Distutils] "setup.py needs to go away" (was [PEP 376] - Open questions on python-dev)

[Jim Fulton]

On Jul 10, 2009, at 9:20 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

> 2009/7/10 Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com>:
>> I don't think this perspective is reflective so much of web  
>> development as
>> of application development.  Those of us who work on web  
>> applications need
>> to provide working applications, often with hard scalability and  
>> reliability
>> requirements.  We need to have control over how our applications are
>> assembled so we can test known configurations and deploy them in a
>> repeatable way. I think this would apply equally well to other  
>> sorts of
>> applications.
>
> On Windows, desktop applications generally use py2exe. While there are
> issues for the *developer* in setting up a reproducible build
> environment for py2exe, for the *end user* the application is
> self-contained and as such the sort of deployment issues I assume you
> are referring to don't exist.

Actually, they exist and are addressed by py2exe.  On other platforms,  
they're addressed with tools like buildout, and virtualenv, and  
probably others.


> So, from my POV, all of the machinery to manage multiple versions of
> packages, isolated environments, etc, is inapplicable.
>
> I'm not saying this means such concerns are invalid, merely supporting
> David's point that different communities have different issues.


I don't disagree. I was really just pointing out that there isn't  
anythin special about web developers.  Really the need relates to  
application development.  That is, wen application developer's needs  
aren't really different from other application developers' needs.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation