[Python-Dev] splitting out bdist_*

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eric Smith writes:

 > And I personally use bdist_rpm for my work, which I distribute to a farm 
 > of servers under my control. So no doubt it's used.

Sure, but use for internal distribution is very different from to
problem its being asked to solve now, isn't it?  IIUC, you're
basically using RPM as an installer for a standalone application,
where you set policy at both ends, packaging and installation.  This
may be a group of modules which may have internal interdependencies,
but very likely the environment doesn't change much.  Pretty much
anything will do in that kind of situation, and I don't think it would
matter to you if there are zero, one, or twelve such tools in stdlib,
as long as there's one you like in PyPI somewhere.

 > [That .deb tools are necessarily maintained outside of bdist]
 > proves that [external maintenance] doesn't help given the current
 > state of affairs. I suspect that if all of this additional
 > information needed to build a .deb (for example) could be included
 > as metadata in the python package (using the word "package"
 > loosely), that it would be. It would make the ultimate packager's
 > life easier, and it's no real burden for the original author.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it would be".  Are you referring to
what I believe to be true, that because Python and Python-based apps
need to integrate with the rest of the OS, it's quite burdensome for
module authors to include the necessary information, which is likely
to vary from packaging tool to packaging tool, and according to policy
even among packagers using the same tool?  Or do you mean that it
would be useful, so it would be nice if such information were
included, and that as you see it the required effort would be small?