[Python-ideas] More "ensure*" packages

[Steve Dower]

Didn't see Donald's email, so I'm replying via Alex's reply.

13.08.2015, 20:35, Donald Stufft kirjoitti:
> So I guess my question is, instead of continuing down a path where we
> add more ensure* style modules to the standard library, why not do
> something similar and have “Python the Language” and “The Python
> Platform”, and the platform would be the Python language + N
> “important” or “popular” packages. This could release on a quicker
> release schedule than Python itself (since it would really be more
> like a meta package than anything that itself got developed) and would
> give the ability to ship things like this without the problems that
> we’ve had with ensurepip. From a downstream perspective they would
> just package all of this stuff as normal and it would just be
> available as normal. We could even publish a metapackage on PyPI that
> had no code of it’s own, but existed simply to list all of the
> platform packages as dependencies (with ==) and then people could
> easily depend on the Python “platform” in their own code.
 >
 > This would essentially involve someone(s) needing to be the gatekeeper
 > of which libraries become part of the Python platform, some small
 > packaging shims to handle the metapackage on PyPI, and then the
 > installer stuff for OSX and Windows (probably nothing for other OSs?
 > Or maybe a tarball? I don’t know).

So basically we could add a requirements.txt into the core CPython repo 
and installers could trigger it (with user permission) on install? We 
could call it "python-platform.txt", and even add an 
"ensurepythonplatform" module to run the install (all names are only 
suggestions).

I'd still like to bundle wheels with the latest available versions at 
build so that non-networked installs can get the packages, if not 
necessarily the latest. This seems like a better long term approach than 
one-ensure-module-per-package.

I feel like moving tkinter&co onto PyPI is the more controversial 
suggestion :)

Cheers,
Steve