Fredrik Lundh writes:

it's revews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

Heh. If harsh, uninformed responses make you wonder whether it's worth doing free software, then you're in the wrong social philanthropy movement. Make the software good quality, release it in the standard format (in this case, a Distutils ‘sdist’ on PyPI), respond in a timely manner to genuine requests for help. Eggs are certainly not a requirement, nor is responding to hostility like the above comment. If you *want* to respond, you can politely direct them to URL:http://docs.python.org/install/ where they can learn how to install Python distributions — no mention of eggs at all. -- \ “What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy | `\ river to save a solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.” —Jack | _o__) Handey | Ben Finney

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

Oh, it was just yet another Zope developer behaving like an ass. Why am I not surprised?

Tarring an entire community for the actions of one twit is more than a little unfair. It's fine that you don't like eggs and it's fine that you don't want to provide them. There's a reason egg-based packaging tools make it fairly easy to create an egg from a normal sdist package. As for people being twits... it's the internet. There isn't a lot to be done other than to ignore them. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------

Am Montag, den 05.10.2009, 13:07 +0200 schrieb Christian Heimes:

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

Oh, it was just yet another Zope developer behaving like an ass. Why am I not surprised?

</F>

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

it's reviews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

</F>

Actually Jens is a Plone developer ...

I'm including Jens in this discussion so he may shed some light on his comment.

Christian

I wrote a private message to Frederik (gmail account) and apologised for my wrong comment. It was targeted wrong. Note-to-self: Never post when angry about some $whatever. And as far as I understand PIL is not the problem, but the packaging/ setuptools. For the records: PIL is a great piece of software and I dont want to miss it. I hope in future we have a packaging-tool solving those problems. regards Jens

On Oct 5, 2009, at 4:59 AM, Ben Finney wrote:

Fredrik Lundh writes:

...

it's revews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

Heh. If harsh, uninformed responses make you wonder whether it's worth doing free software, then you're in the wrong social philanthropy movement.

Make the software good quality, release it in the standard format (in this case, a Distutils ‘sdist’ on PyPI), respond in a timely manner to genuine requests for help. Eggs are certainly not a requirement, nor is responding to hostility like the above comment.

If you *want* to respond, you can politely direct them to URL:http://docs.python.org/install/ where they can learn how to install Python distributions — no mention of eggs at all.

Package owners are not allowed to comment on their own PyPI packages, so responding to comments requires tracking down the person who left them and contacting them in some other way. Doug

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 6:26 AM, Jens W. Klein wrote:

Am Montag, den 05.10.2009, 13:07 +0200 schrieb Christian Heimes:

...

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

Oh, it was just yet another Zope developer behaving like an ass.  Why am I not surprised?

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

it's reviews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

Peace for the world brothers . Lots of yoga, meditation, tai-chi ... and tons of FOSS

...

...

...

  no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

[...]

Note-to-self: Never post when angry about some $whatever.

e.g. I don't do it either when I'm drunk or thinking about Britney ;o)

And as far as I understand PIL is not the problem, but the packaging/ setuptools.

well I just mentioned few times before (and J. P. Eby said something too, many times actually ;o) that setuptools solved a crucial problem that was unsolved when it was released

For the records: PIL is a great piece of software and I dont want to miss it.

Yes, and the fact is that without setuptools many other wonderful (commands | libs | frameworks | apps | software) would be in the darkness. I mention some of them : - setuptools `test` command - Trac - PasteDeploy - ... and here fuel is over ... there are a lot believe me ;o) the "small" price to pay is that there are a few annoying implementation details in there ...

I hope in future we have a packaging-tool solving those problems.

... or OTOH that some time is needed to improve it ;o) but considering the benefits ... Besides you could use {{{ $ easy_install -Z eggs_are_awesome.egg }}} and the package will be installed directly in the file system ( modify .pth + PYTHONPATH if desired ;o). -- Regards, Olemis. Blog ES: http://simelo-es.blogspot.com/ Blog EN: http://simelo-en.blogspot.com/ Featured article: Nabble - Trac Users - Coupling trac and symfony framework - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TracGViz-full/~3/hlNmupEonF0/Coupling-trac-an...

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:

Jesse Noller schrieb:

...

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

it's revews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

  no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

</F>

Unfortunately; we're now staring down the barrel of having youtube-style comments on Python packages on the index.

Yes, unfortunately. I originally thought that restricting the commenters to those with a PyPI account would make them useful, but seeing this one (even if it was not intended) and the comment on hgsvn that belongs into a bug tracker instead, I'm not so sure anymore.

Georg

There would need to be a fair amount of work to make the system useful and almost self-policing. Not to mention people can make plenty of fake pypi accounts for pure astroturfing reasons. jesse

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

User ratings and comments are the future for "app store" style sites such as PyPI

Interestingly, I consider sites like PyPI as developer resources rather than the more end-user-centric "App Store" sites. While I don't consider it bad to provide support for commenting and rating, I find it much less valuable than for end-user-centric sites. But then, some may find me a bit retro. :-/ -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at gmail.com> "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written." --Henry Miller

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Jesse Noller wrote:

...

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:

...

Jesse Noller schrieb:

...

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

...

it's revews like this that makes me wonder if releasing open source is a good idea:

  no egg - worst seen ever, remove it from pypi or provide an egg (jensens, 2009-10-05, 0 points)

</F>

Unfortunately; we're now staring down the barrel of having youtube-style comments on Python packages on the index.

Yes, unfortunately. I originally thought that restricting the commenters to those with a PyPI account would make them useful, but seeing this one (even if it was not intended) and the comment on hgsvn that belongs into a bug tracker instead, I'm not so sure anymore.

Georg

There would need to be a fair amount of work to make the system useful and almost self-policing. Not to mention people can make plenty of fake pypi accounts for pure astroturfing reasons.

It seems like a worthy cause though. User ratings and comments are the future for "app store" style sites such as PyPI, and spam unfortunately comes with the terrain. There are plenty of things we can learn about fighting spam and other forms of vandalism from other areas of the social web, including our very own wiki, and other wikis (WikiPedia survives despite spam).

I agree that feedback, commentary/etc is a Good Thing; but doing it right is not an easy thing, and typically implementing it poorly leads to spam, people filing bugs in comments, astroturfing, etc. Just on first glance, I could see immediate improvements around: * Moderation * Allowing authors to respond * Flagging as spam * Upvoting/downvoting * Nested conversations And so on. Sites like stackoverflow/reddit/hackernews/etc have spent a lot of time "doing it right". I know, I know - patches welcome. The problem here is that I would make an argument that in the case of PyPI nothing is better than what we have currently. jesse

At 01:26 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Jens W. Klein wrote:

And as far as I understand PIL is not the problem, but the packaging/ setuptools. For the records: PIL is a great piece of software and I dont want to miss it.

Actually, the problem is that the package is called "PIL" in Pypi, but the actual installed package is called "Imaging". If you want to depend on PIL, you need to add "Imaging" to your dependencies, and add a dependency link to http://effbot.org/downloads/ in order to make it work... at least on platforms where you have a compiler. If you're working on Windows, you need to depend on PIL in order to get a download to work, but once installed, it's still called Imaging. So, pretty much you're hosed either way. ;-) If the package had just *one* name, used consistently for source, binaries, and PyPI registration, it would work. Unfortunately, setuptools is not a human being and can't figure out that "PIL" and "Imaging" are two different names for the same thing. (I'm guessing that PIL was registered on PyPI manually, before the "setup.py register" command existed. Heck, it was probably being distributed before the distutils even existed, and indeed before there were such things as "packages" in Python.) When I was first writing setuptools, I tried to get it to work with effbot.org packages as best I could, but there were some things I just couldn't do without hardcoding special cases, and working around this problem was one of them.

Fred Drake wrote:

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

User ratings and comments are the future for "app store" style sites such as PyPI

Interestingly, I consider sites like PyPI as developer resources rather than the more end-user-centric "App Store" sites.

While I don't consider it bad to provide support for commenting and rating, I find it much less valuable than for end-user-centric sites. But then, some may find me a bit retro. :-/

When it comes to comments and recommendations for selecting software packages, developers *are* the end users :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

When it comes to comments and recommendations for selecting software packages, developers *are* the end users :)

Yes, most certainly. But developers as consumers are very different from application users as consumers, which is what I was getting at. The convenience interfaces for commenting on a library are far less valuable for developers, IMO, since developers are expected to better understand how their context impacts their perception. Useful feedback from a developer just doesn't fit will into the giant-pile-of-comments UIs conventional for non-developers. If I'm wrong about that, then I'm saddened by the state of the profession. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at gmail.com> "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written." --Henry Miller

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Olemis Lang wrote:

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Fred Drake wrote:

...

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

...

When it comes to comments and recommendations for selecting software packages, developers *are* the end users :)

Yes, most certainly.  But developers as consumers are very different from application users as consumers, which is what I was getting at.

The convenience interfaces for commenting on a library are far less valuable for developers, IMO, since developers are expected to better understand how their context impacts their perception.  Useful feedback from a developer just doesn't fit will into the giant-pile-of-comments UIs conventional for non-developers.

+1

IMO :

 - decision matrix are useful to decide which lib to use (i.e. which    one supports the features I need ;o). BTW that's something cool about    wikipedia ;o)

I mean feature matrix

 - project metrics and build results are useful to have a idea    of project dev status (e.g. coverage, test results, ...).  - the rest goes to issue tracker + project (sites | wikis). that's what    they are for ;o)

-- Regards,

Olemis.

Blog ES: http://simelo-es.blogspot.com/ Blog EN: http://simelo-en.blogspot.com/

Featured article: Nabble - Trac Users - Coupling trac and symfony framework  - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TracGViz-full/~3/hlNmupEonF0/Coupling-trac-an...

-- Regards, Olemis. Blog ES: http://simelo-es.blogspot.com/ Blog EN: http://simelo-en.blogspot.com/ Featured article: Nabble - Trac Users - Coupling trac and symfony framework - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TracGViz-full/~3/hlNmupEonF0/Coupling-trac-an...

Antoine Pitrou writes:

Guido van Rossum writes:

...

There are plenty of things we can learn about fighting spam and other forms of vandalism from other areas of the social web, including our very own wiki, and other wikis (WikiPedia survives despite spam).

Doesn't Wikipedia have a lot of human eyes watching, however?

Yes. In fact Wikipedia's real issue is not spam, but edit wars. It just happens that the same people who are willing to watch to make sure that nobody "corrects" the facts consider spam damage, too, and they get rid of it as part of their mission. What this means is that the most active parts of the Wikipedia are also quickly policed. What's left is much less attractive for spammers, and there are a number of volunteers willing to respond fairly promptly to reports of spam in articles that nobody currently considers "theirs". I think it could probably be adapted to Python community scale, but it would probably require new mechanisms (spam reporting and possibly cleaning -- in Wikipedia you hit the revert button, choose a known good version, and you're done) in PyPI, and recruitment of volunteers to take care of spam to products currently not "owned". IMO it would be better to design developer-specific mechanisms rather than a generic commenting vehicle, cf. Fred Drake's thinking.

P.J. Eby writes:

For example, having a packages reddit (nb: open source, written in Python), where people can upvote or downvote packages and leave comments. That's probably the minimum amount of checks and balances required to avoid problems of the sort the PyPI commenting feature is already having, since others will be able to reply to the comments, and downvote nonsense into oblivion.

Seems like a reasonable idea, given that there's already a Python reddit which seems popular. There was also www.cheeserater.com (which appears down at the moment) which was a Django demo site (source available at http://github.com/jacobian/cheeserater) for rating PyPI packages. I just created a "cheeseshop" sub-reddit to play around with.

(Alternatively, shutting off the comment system would also work. Nothing stops people from using Google to search for "foo sucks" or "problems using foo" if they want to research what's been said about a package.)

Yes, but it's good to have all the feedback in one place, if possible. Regards, Vinay Sajip

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

Oh, it was just yet another Zope developer behaving like an ass. Why am I not surprised?

Actually Plohn, there aren't that many Zope developers left ;-) Chris - looking mournfully at his sig... -- Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk