Op donderdag 30-11-2006 om 21:48 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Steve Holden:
I think the point is that some distros (Debian is the one that springs to mind most readily, but I'm not a distro archivist) require a separate install for distutils even though it's been a part of the standard *Python* distro since 2.3 (2.2?)
So, it isn't that you can't get distutils, it's that you have to take an extra step over and above installing Python.
No, it just means that several parts of the python.org source package are spread over several binary packages, just like happens with hundreds or thousands of other packages, and any Debian (or Ubuntu or other distro doing this) administrator worth his or her money should be aware of that, and be able to find those packages. E.g. on a debian "sarge" system: $ apt-cache showsrc python2.4 | grep Binary Binary: python2.4-doc, python2.4, python2.4-examples, python2.4-tk, python2.4-dev, idle-python2.4, python2.4-dbg, python2.4-gdbm Or on an Ubuntu "edgy" system: $ apt-cache showsrc python2.4 | grep Binary Binary: python2.4-dbg, python2.4-dev, python2.4, python2.4-doc, idle-python2.4, python2.4-minimal, python2.4-examples Probably the Debian maintainers could have named packages differently to make things less confusing for newbies (e.g. by having the 'pythonX.Y' packages being meta-packages that depend on all binary packages built from the upstream source package), but that doesn't mean splitting "python" (or other projects) up in several packages is wrong. E.g. when installing on an flash drive, people are probably quite happy to leave the 20 MiB of Python documentation out... Maybe python.org can include several logical "divisions" in the python.org distribution and make it easy for OS distro packagers to make separate packages if they want to, as most of them are quite happy to have less work to do, provided the upstream "divisions" do more or less what they want. ;-) (Oh, and such a division should IMHO also include a "minimal python" for embedded/low-resource hardware use, where things like distutils, GUI toolkits, a colelction of 20 XML libraries and documentation are most likely not needed.) -- Jan Claeys