Jan Claeys wrote: [...]
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...
Right, who cares about newbies, they're only the future of the language, after all. I take your point that some flexibility is advantageous once you get past the newbie stage, but I think that here we are talking about trying to avoid mis-steps that will potentially put people off making that transition.
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.)
If only there were some guarantee that the distros would respect any project partitioning imposed by python-deb we might stand a chance of resolving these issues. By and large they do tend to go their own way, though. I suppose the only alternative is prominently-posted materials on python.org about "Python on Debian", "Python on Ubuntu", ... and various addition to the FAQs. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden