On 12/29/05, Jeff Pitman jeff.pitman@gmail.com wrote:
This may have been discussed ad nauseum already, but as I tried to package turbogears for Fedora/CentOS, I thought I'd throw in 2 cents.
Hey, great! I'm sure many will appreciate the effort!
I see that --single-version-externally-managed has been added as an option so that .deb/.rpm packaging can take advantage of that relying upon apt/yum/smart to take care of business. Hopefully, this will be pushed out soon. (Because turbogears script generation is not trivial to package. I think I'll just include a generated script as one of the Sources, for now.)
Note that TurboGears 0.9 absolutely needs to run as a proper egg. (When you say you're including the generated script as part of the sources, I'm not sure if that means that you're bypassing the egg packaging entirely...)
I think the goal for setuptools on rpm/deb-based systems should focus on getting $HOME setup and managed correctly for packages not provided by the system. For example, if I had an ISP which provided python2.4, but not TurboGears, then I could use .egg to manage a setup in $HOME to use the packages correctly. Currently, -d/-s and other options can be used. But, if the user isn't root, maybe it should be the default behavior: install and manage in $HOME.
Setting things up in $HOME is definitely a good thing, and doesn't take very much effort. I hope more ISPs will do so (and it's something I'm working on with TurboGears hosting providers).
Also, are there efforts to detect if a package is already installed? For example, if "python-sqlobject" is installed, can setuptools detect the lib if the install_requires has "SQLObject"? I think peering between .egg and .deb/.rpm to be a difficult problem. So, having it all or nothing would be a cleaner policy. .deb/.rpm to manage /usr installed packages/modules and .egg to manage $HOME installed packages.
The problem is with the missing metadata. setuptools doesn't know what version of SQLObject that is, and TurboGears most definitely requires 0.7 and up. I think the goal is ultimately to have system-installed .debs/.rpms that are also eggs (with the proper metadata). TurboGears 0.9 makes use of setuptools' extension mechanism which is why the egg metadata needs to be available.
Kevin