[Pythonmac-SIG] Package Manager idea, adding a URL scheme

[Just van Rossum]

Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> I think PackMan needs to generally support installing external
> libraries (Python in general is great as a wrapper for C++ modules),

As Bob and Ronald said, if feasable, linking such a lirbrary statically
causes the least problems.

> but I think the solution to the cross-platform is to have platform
> specific databases, as Jack has been doing. You can still have
> cross-platform packages (i.e. all Python source), they just need to
> be added to each of the platform specific databases. The
> platform-specific packages can just point to a different install file
> on each platform. The only problem is that for some people this is
> doing three times the work when it's really redundant.

I'm not so much worried about the database part, but I do worry about
whether there is a cross platform notion of what a library _is_. On OSX
we have the luxury of having frameworks that can contain lots of stuff.
But should packman be able to install (for example) Tcl/Tk on other
unixy platforms? On Windows? I'm feeling rather pessimistic about that,
so I tend to think that installing external libraries is beyond the
scope of PackMan.

Just