[Distutils] GUI for Python package Management - Right w ay to install packages?

[P.J. Eby]

At 07:57 AM 1/30/2009 -0500, David Lyon wrote:
>I seem to have a prototype gui of some description running based
>around the PyPiXmlRpc
>
>Using that code I can locate packages, but not install or download
>them.... (strange - incomplete api i guess)
>
>Anyway, now I need a foolproof/pre-existing way to download and
>install modules.
>
>This following script seems to pop up as being a good one to
>use:
>
>http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
>
>One good (?) thing is that it seems to resolve package dependencies.
>
>but... my question is... is it "right" ? as far as distutils
>and the general python programming community is concerned?

Apparently not.  ;-)

However, the primary complaints have to do with how the resulting 
packages are installed, not how they're found or obtained.  And it's 
quite possible to use easy_install as a base for locating and 
retrieving packages from PyPI, based on version requirements, 
*without* using it as the actual installation method.

See, e.g., Ian Bicking's install tool (whose name escapes me at the 
moment), that does this.  zc.buildout wraps easy_install in a similar 
way, to implement still other installation policies.

Using e.g. 'easy_install -e -b somedir SomePackage', will get you a 
somedir/somepackage directory (with 'somepackage' always in lower 
case) with the package's complete source code.  If you then wish to 
install it with distutils or something else, you can then do 
so.  (This is more or less what Ian's tool does.)


>Instead of this, is there even a "right-way" or "better way"?

Not really -- hence the current huge discussions.  ;-)  (Which, by 
the way, I'm glad to see.  I tried to get the same basic discussion 
rolling a few months back, but it didn't really go anywhere back then.)