[SciPy-dev] a modest proposal for technology previews

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 01:58:15PM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
> Eggs + pypi could help for that, maybe.

Currently Eggs + pypi don't work well-enough for compiled code. There is
a famous "sandbox violation" bug that strikes every so and then when
installing source packages that have to be builts. It may be a due to a
bad interaction between numpy.distutils and setuptools. 

> I wish we had a system like CRAN, where inside R, you just say you want
> to install a new package, and they have the infrastructure to make this
> work. IMHO, that's the only solution in the long term,

Absolutely. And right now this is not the case. Trying to rely on eggs
and pypi for non-trivial packages means your users will experience
incomprehensible failures. And I am not even discussing the mess created
by an upgrade after eggs have been improperly cleaned up, which is
another large source of failure for installs.

Gaël