[Python-Dev] Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB)

[Jan Claeys]

Op vrijdag 01-12-2006 om 00:16 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Steve
Holden:
> Jan Claeys wrote:
> [...]
> > Probably the Debian maintainers could have named packages differently to
> > make things less confusing for newbies (e.g. by having the 'pythonX.Y'
> > packages being meta-packages that depend on all binary packages built
> > from the upstream source package), but that doesn't mean splitting
> > "python" (or other projects) up in several packages is wrong.  E.g. when
> > installing on an flash drive, people are probably quite happy to leave
> > the 20 MiB of Python documentation out...
> > 
> Right, who cares about newbies, they're only the future of the language, 
> after all. I take your point that some flexibility is advantageous once 
> you get past the newbie stage, but I think that here we are talking 
> about trying to avoid mis-steps that will potentially put people off 
> making that transition.

Like I said, it's possible to split Python without making things
complicated for newbies.  The fact that Debian didn't do so in the past
might be a considered a packaging bug, but the problem isn't in the
practice of splitting upstream projects in several binary packages
itself.

> > Maybe python.org can include several logical "divisions" in the
> > python.org distribution and make it easy for OS distro packagers to make
> > separate packages if they want to, as most of them are quite happy to
> > have less work to do, provided the upstream "divisions" do more or less
> > what they want. ;-)   (Oh, and such a division should IMHO also include
> > a "minimal python" for embedded/low-resource hardware use, where things
> > like distutils, GUI toolkits, a colelction of 20 XML libraries and
> > documentation are most likely not needed.)

> If only there were some guarantee that the distros would respect any 
> project partitioning imposed by python-deb we might stand a chance of 
> resolving these issues.

There will never be a guarantee, as some distros might have very special
targets, but I'm pretty sure that most distros would follow any
_sensible_ proposition (and looking at current practice might give a
good clue about what they want).


-- 
Jan Claeys