On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

>So at the end, the end user would chose an installer that is
>compatible with these archive, and know how to install them. In other
>words, have ez_setup for example, run once for all at the Python
>level, and be THE installer. Or run a pip_setup or whatever.

How would OS vendors get into the game? I could imagine that Ubuntu would
want to make an opinionated choice for our users, and maybe even set things up
so that packages are installed from our archives (as .deb packages) by
default. This would make things very easy for the majority of users, though
of course we'd have to allow experts to customize it to grab from the
Cheeseshop or use a different installer.

I could see how a deb might make sense for an unqualified installation, i.e., one where no specific version or location is indicated. *Probably* a specific version would be okay, but the way deb archives work it seems like the archive would usually be unable to satisfy the request. It would be interesting if you could also hook into a deb generation script, and install ad hoc packages as debs.

This really isn't a system choice, but a where-the-package-is-installed choice. If installing in /usr/lib/* then using the system package makes sense. If installing anywhere else it doesn't make sense (home directory, virtualenv environment, something ad hoc using install options). I wonder if it would work best to control this through some distutils.cfg-like file (distutils.cfg is terrible though), that would be looked up based on the installation location.

--
Ian Bicking | http://blog.ianbicking.org