I see that between PEP241 and 243, Py is moving towards a central module repository. My question is: has any thought been given to the idea of having one application/library be dependent on another library, and for the download/install to be done as part of setup.py?
For example, I'm writing a simple application that uses wxPython -- which not everyone has installed. During installation, I can right now in setup.py abort if wxPython isn't found -- but it would be much nicer to users (IMO) if it can download & install wxPython silently.
This is more complicated than just that; I'd like to see: . The ability for users (special command-line option?) to download all dependent packages to a local directory first. . The ability for distutils to substitute newer versions in place of older -- this is a lot more tricky, since we *don't* want it to do that for non-backwards-compatible differences.
I'd like to see the basic functionality anyway, even if the two features above aren't done until later. The reason being that my intended user base are not programmers or even serious computer users at all. In fact, if there was any way to package Python itself with my app, I'd like to know about it (is there?).
I just don't want to see us in the future run into what Linux did a little while ago -- oh, your update for package x requires an update to package y, so after you download and install the update to package y, you find it requires an update to package z, ...
-Steve