On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 14:50, Jesse Noller <jnoller@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Paul Moore<p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
2009/7/20 Jesse Noller <jnoller@gmail.com>:
So python -m "setuptools.commands.easy_install" <args> or python `which easy_install` is a-ok for people? I find it much easier to tell someone "run easy_install" or "run pylint" rather than either one of the previous examples.
No, but "python -m easy_install" is fine. The fact that setuptools doesn't provide a form designed for use with python -m doesn't mean that there's a problem with the feature, just that setuptools wasn't designed with it in mind.
Paul.
I don't know if easy_install does or doesn't - I simply used it as an example. What I don't parse is that python -m <module> is somehow a replacement for ./script - the logic within a script can do a lot more than just firing off the __main__ of a module. Are we saying that "scripts are considered harmful" and recommend people only support -m for this?
There's over 7000 packages, applications and libraries in the cheeseshop right now. A fair number of them would run face first into the non-versioned binary problem. I guess distutils (in a future version) should just deprecate the scripts/entry points options entirely?
I really don't think this is an edge case, or should be unsupported. Sure, the same problem exists outside of the .local directory - you run into this installing things into the default system-level site-packages and /usr/bin /usr/local/bin directories, but there's no real reason we can't make this work better in the context of .local
Taking Paul's follow-up email to this into account, I think we should definitely encourage people support runpy, but that doesn't do away with the usefulness of scripts. Ignoring the convenience factor of having short script names (``hg tip`` is much shorter than ``python2.6 -m mercurial -- tip``), there is also having to remember which interpreter you installed a tool under. Did I install hg under my Python 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 or 2.6 interpreter? I actually had to check the hg script to find that out. And there is also the situation where people are not targeting multiple operating systems and thus have a use for the features a script gives. If I am writing some Linux app in Python I might have some need to run something under bash. So while I totally support pushing people to start using runpy now that __main__.py support exists for packages, I don't think we can just fluff off script support. -Brett