I was in a Packaging BoF yesterday and, although not very relevant to the packager bootstrap thread, Guido has asked me to post some of the concerns. The BoF drew about 15 people, many of whom were packagers for Red Hat, Ubuntu and such. Everyone had strong expressions of frustration with the status quo and most had tried to resolve their issues but had their patches rejected. I am not taking either side and whether those rejections were justified I cannot say, but the general feeling of their concerns intentionally not being addressed isn't healthy. Several had abandoned setuptools, deeming it a failed solution and others called for a fork. To start, I am not a leader of the group nor do I claim I accurately captured and expressed all their concerns. I apologize to those in the BoF for any misrepresentations. 1. Many felt the existing dependency resolver was not correct. They wanted a full tree traversal resulting in an intersection of all restrictions, instead of a first-acceptable-solution approach taking now, which can result in top-level dependencies not being enforced upon lower levels. The latter is faster however. One solution would be to make the resolver pluggable. 2. People want a solution for the handling of documentation. The distutils module has had commented out sections related to this for several years. 3. A more flexible internal handing of the different types of files is needed. Currently the code, data, lib, etc. files are aggregated at build time and people would like them to be kept separate until install/packaging time. They also want greater flexibility in the kinds of files identified for packaging. There is currently a single plugin entrypoint for file_finding, so people have resorted to abusing the setuptools function find_packages() again and again with different include/exclude args. A solution is to expand the set of entrypoints into finer grained categories. They also want a way to expand the set of categories rather than a fixed set, which can be easily done with entrypoint groups and names. People also want a greater variety of file_finders to be included with setuptools. Instead of just CVS and SVN, they want it to comprehend Mercurial, Bazaar, Git and so forth. 4. They want an uninstall setuptools command. Adding one to remove a specific egg isn't difficult but correctly removing those dependencies that came in with that egg, without breaking later installs can be tricky. This is complicated because there isn't a single global package namespace to manage, when you factor in virtualenv and buildout sandboxes and per-user package areas. This differs from how RPMs and .debs are viewed. 5. There was concern over the .pth mechanism used by setuptools re activation. First, there is a (perceived) performance issue with increasingly adding every ZIP file explicitly onto sys.path. This may or may not be a red herring. The other is the use of a single .pth file to control the list of activated packages. Those who produce distributions would prefer a magic directory into which links to distributions could be dropped, similar to the current best practices for Linux, with /etc/conf.d/, /etc/profile.d/, /etc/xinetd.d/ and so forth. 6. There is a need for more extensibility hooks. People want places to plug in special handling. For example: a) setuptools has a --record option to capture the list of files installed for use by subsequent packaging tools. Some want that list to be available to a setuptools plugin. b) some want hooks for post-build/post-install actions, instead of the current approach of writing a custom build class that handles it all. 7. Many wanted to ability to install files anywhere in the install tree and not just under the Python package. Under distutils this was possible but it was removed in setuptools for security reasons. Custom code can still be written to do this explicitly but this is not popular. Neither setuptools nor distutils has the ability to rename files at install time. A fair question is whether it is the job of setuptools (or any Python packaging solution) to cover all these bases. The risk of not doing the job is that some of those in attendance were rolling their own solutions which do not play well with packages installed using other means, not seeing them. Distutils has intentionally tried to -not- be a general replacement packaging solution, with its support of the "bdist" command for various platform-specific distribution formats. We should continue not trying to replace platform-specific packaging technologies but perhaps improve our control of their creation. As mentioned, some of these concerns can be resolved by adding customization-pressure-release entrypoints to setuptools, and some can be handled with much better documentation of use cases and what to do. And some of it is confusion over packaging libraries versus applications, where setuptools focuses on the former and zc.buildout focuses on the latter. But buildout is very young, maintains isolation from the system Python and was not known to many of the packaging BoF attendees. Some of this may seem down on eggs, but I think they are really cool and would like to see them adopted as the standard for packaging Python software. There are rough spots on setuptools and buildout that would benefit from opening up the process and bringing in more developers, and communicating what they are and more importantly, what they are not. I believe the lack of a coherent packaging and deployment story for Python is hurting its uptake in many sectors and would like to work with others to strengthen this area of Python. -Jeff