Recently, Skip Montanaro said:

Andrew> My personal leaning is that we can get more bang for the buck by Andrew> working on the Distutils effort, so that installing a package Andrew> like PyExpat becomes much easier, rather than piling more things Andrew> into the core distribution.

Amen to that. See Guido's note and my response regarding soundex in the Doc-SIG. Perhaps you could get away with a very small core distribution that only contained the stuff necessary to pull everything else from the net via http or ftp...

I don't know whether this subject belongs on the python-dev list (is there a separate distutils list?), but let's please be very careful with this. The Perl people apparently think that their auto-install stuff is so easy to use that if you find a tool on the net that needs Perl they'll just give you a few incantations you need to build the "correct" perl to run the tool, but I've never managed to do so. My last try was when I spent 2 days to try and get the perl-based Palm software for unix up and running. With various incompatilble versions of perl installed in /usr/local by the systems staff and knowing nothing about perl I had to give up at some point, because it was costing far more time (and diskspace:-) than the whole thing was worth. Something like mailman is (afaik) easy to install for non-pythoneers because it only depends on a single, well-defined Python distribution. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.oratrix.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm