On Sep 20, 2005, at 8:59 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
<trimming a few lists from my reply>
At 07:12 PM 9/20/2005 -0400, Bob Ippolito wrote:
I hope that the packager-future will be largely setuptools based and that the various platform-specific packagers will share a lot more code in the future (setuptools, modulegraph, etc.), making maintenance easier and more fun for everyone. This was my primary use case when I was initially discussing the egg spec with PJE back around pycon-time (though I have been unfortunately useless implementing and evolving it).
Right now, I think the packagers and the packages are at odds, because the packagers need metadata that the packages don't provide (in a pre-setuptools universe)... so right now users (or the packagers) need to know a lot of magic incantations to make the various complicated Python packages work, where with setuptools based packages the magic incantations are built-in :)
Also, my outsider-observation of both py2exe and py2app is that they are significantly complicated by the attempt to select and distribute only a subset of the Python standard library.
No, stdlib is easy because it's not that wonky and I've already done a pretty thorough analysis of what imports what (from C or Python) and coded around it. The "coded around it" is basically just a couple lines of code that enumerate the implicit dependencies. It's third party that's hard. If everyone used pkg_resources and setuptools then that'd be easy too, but they don't yet :) py2app currently works around that fact by including package-specific knowledge for a couple popular packages, but I don't want to maintain that forever. -bob