On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi folks, here is an idea that came out of (not quite) thin air:

Pypi, setuptools, distribute & Co are all very useful for finding,
installing, upgrading, etc. of python packages. They even handle
dependencies! Yaaaay!

However, there is one more thing that could be built on top of them
that would make them even more useful. This is the <drum roll please>
Python Package Collections! This would be an online service to
organize packages into collections allowing one to download, install,
build, upgrade, etc. many packages at once. Say somebody finds
package1, package2, package3, package4 very useful and figure they
naturally belong together by topic. And so our test person always
wants to have them all installed so when he downloads a new python
version which will make his python arsenal not only 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7
3.1 3.2 3.3 but also 3.4, he won't have to install all these packages
separately again but he can just install the collection with one
command or one click.

You might ask why can't our test person just do "install package1"
then "install package2" then "install package3" then "install
package4"? Well, certainly he could do that but if he found that these
four packages nicely go together chances are others will find it handy
to have them all too. So our brilliant test person will want to share
his collection with others telling them essentially "if you like
working with X" or "you frequently develop for Y" then "you can just
install my collection and you will be ready to go"!

Anybody could organize packages into collections and I bet there would
be very popular ones like "mathematics" including all sorts of math
packages from pypi, or "pdfgoodies" including everything pdf related
that one typically needs for work with pdf. These don't have to depend
on each other (dependencies are handled quite well by existing tools),
they just need to have the property that they are very handy to have
together.

To be honest the idea is not mine, take a look at
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ how add-ons for
firefox are organized into collections. It's basically the same idea
but for python packages.

This whole thing could be integrated into pypi or initially the idea
could be tested on a separate site to see if it catches on.

What do you all think?

Cheers,
Daniel


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