On Jan 20, 2010, at 02:43 PM, David Lyon wrote:
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Jesse Noller wrote:
A SCM is not a "package management system".
Exactly. It almost makes the need for a "package management system" pretty much obsolete if you can update your code directly from the developers sources.
That's what all these SCMs provide. Plus it's addictive. It's hard to go back to 'package' style technology once you have all your code on an SCM based feed.
Well... I'm not so sure. A package management system like apt does a /ton/ of additional bookkeeping and work to ensure a robust, highly consistent, functioning system. And while both Python and most Linux distributions have their own notion of "package management", they don't always play nicely together. Tarek and the distutils-sig's work is trying to make the world a better place by bridging this gap better, and there is code out there that makes it easier to say import a Python package from the Cheeseshop and .deb-ify it for use on Debian and Ubuntu. There's also work being done in Launchpad that will allow you to "build-from-branch" so that in a sense you could let a build farm take your Bazaar branches and automatically build the packages from them. I've strayed off-topic I suppose, but I see SCMs and package managers as complementary technologies that help with important parts of the process of delivering software to end-users, but I don't quite see how one can make the other obsolete. -Barry