In line with this discussion, I found a document that details the aspects of CPAN that can be used for writing packaging systems in other languages. The author says: over the years people from at least Python, Ruby, and Java communities have approached me or other core CPAN people to ask basically "How did we do it? http://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html -srid On Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:53:44 -0800, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
I just found this comment on my blog. People have told me this in person too, so I believe it is real pain (even if the solution may be elusive and the suggested solutions may not work). But I don't know how to improve the world. Is the work on distutils-sig going to be enough? Or do we need some other kind of work in addition? Do we need more than PyPI?
--Guido
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: dalloliogm <noreply-comment@blogger.com> Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 8:01 AM Subject: [Neopythonic] New comment on Python in the Scientific World. To: gvanrossum@gmail.com
dalloliogm has left a new comment on your post "Python in the Scientific World":
Python is suffering a lot in the scientific word, because it has not a CPAN-like repository.
PyPI is fine, but it is still far from the level of CPAN, CRAN, Bioconductor, etc..
Scientists who use programming usually have a lot of different interests and approaches, therefore it is really difficult to write a package that can be useful to everyone. Other programming language like Perl and R have repository-like structure which enable people to download packages easily, and to upload new ones and organize them withouth having to worry about having to integrate them into existing packages.
This is what is happening to biopython now: it is a monolitic package that it is supposed to work for any bioinformatic problem; but this is so general that to accomplish that you would need to add a lot of dependencies, to numpy, networkx, suds, any kind of library. However, since easy_install is not as ready yet as the counterparts in other languages, if the biopython developers add too many dependencies, nobody will be able to install it properly, and nobody will use it.
Posted by dalloliogm to Neopythonic at November 6, 2009 8:01 AM