Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
The Python community covers a broad spectrum of use cases, and I suspect that's one of the big reasons packaging can get so contentious - the goals end up being in direct conflict. Currently, I've identified at least half a dozen significant communities with very different needs (the names aren't meant to be all encompassing, just good representatives of each category, and many individuals will span multiple categories depending on which hat they're wearing at the time):
One set of users not covered by your list is people who need to Cross-Compile Python to another CPU architecture (i.e. x86 to ARM/PowerPC) for use with embedded computers. Distutils does not handle this very well. If you want a recent overview of what these users go through you should see my talk from PyCon 2012: http://pyvideo.org/video/682/cross-compiling-python-c-extensions-for-embedde -Chris