On 22/03/2008, Steve Holden <steve@holdenweb.com> wrote:
Well, I've probably been killfiled into non-existence on this list by now, but it seems to me that we are in danger of answering the wrong problem yet again. But that's all I have to say on this topic, so you can all heave a sigh a relief and get on with messing it up ;-)
You probably have my company in the killfile, but I have a nagging feeling in the same direction. My biggest problem is that I can't express what I believe is the *right* problem, beyond the over-general statement that it seems crucial to me that there should be a single, unified way of managing *all* packages installed in a given Python installation. Whether that's a Python-only solution, or the system packager, doesn't matter. There should be only one way to do it, to reuse a well-known phrase :-) If you know how to state nature of the right problem, that would be useful. All this talk of "playing nicely with the system packager" seems to imply that people are designing a second solution, and trying to manage the interaction, rather than deciding on *one* solution (which by definition has no interaction to worry about). It's reasonable to have multiple solutions for multiple Python installations (system packager for the system python, python packager for a local install, for example) but that's a different matter. Oh, and application installation is (should be) completely different. On Windows, applications should probably be bundled with their own Python interpreter, a la py2exe. On Unix/Linux, I don't know what the standard is, so I'd have to defer to others. Paul.