On Mar 31, 2015, at 09:14 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
We need to build from source not just to ensure our binaries match the published source code, but also because our build systems are designed to let us *patch* the packages before we build them. This is what lets us backport security updates, bug fixes, and sometimes even entire features without needing to rebase a package on a new upstream release of a project.
For Debian, all this, plus it's required by the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines.
(AFAIK Debian still favours invoking setup.py directly, hopefully Barry will correct me if I'm wrong).
Correct. For any setup.py/distutils/setuptools-based project, we have one preferred, recommended, and non-deprecated "build system", and though it's fairly flexible, it mostly relies on a working setup.py. As Debian Jessie is frozen right now, I don't expect that to change for now. We have sort of a love-hate relationship with pip, but it would be interesting to sit down at Pycon and discuss how we might like to see downstream distro support improve or change as it relates to common upstream packaging standards. Cheers, -Barry