[Pythonmac-SIG] Why Do I Explicitly Need MacPython

[Bob Ippolito]

On 10/2/06, Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
> > It's not a great idea to put a front-end on easy_install at this
> > point. It would be an enormous amount of work for very little gain.
> > It's also not at all designed such that it's easy to break what it's
> > doing up into little chunks so that you can properly display status
> > and whatnot from a GUI.
>
> I wasn't imagining a lot of work -- just *something* that allows new
> users to point and click at a egg and get something useful.

Well it's possible to create an association with .egg files to open up
a terminal and run easy_install, but that's kinda pointless because
nobody downloads eggs manually.

> > Using easy_install is quite easy -- you type "easy_install
> > WhatYouNeed" and press return. That's it. Users currently need some
> > familiarity with Terminal in order to get anything done with Python
> > anyway.
>
> That's a good point, just the same. Now if just put a copy of
> easy_install in the standard MacPython installer, we'd be one step in
> the right direction.

That would deviate from the norm where MacPython ships only with what
comes with Python -- nothing third party (beyond dependencies of
extensions that ship with Python).

That said, I'm +0.

-bob