[Baypiggies] Assuming NoPython is good criticism. (Rant)

[Rich Pixley]

Keith Dart wrote:
> === On Tue, 09/08, Rich Pixley wrote: ===
>   
>> Personally, I think it's sad that the packaging and community library 
>> attempts, (like pypi & EasyInstall[sic]), have been language specific 
>> rather than leveraging the packaging systems native to the OS, (like 
>> rpm, debian, etc).  While this makes it easier to interactively
>> download one package on one uncontrolled machine, it makes it more
>> difficult to do things like automated loads across multiple servers,
>> multiple server instances for things like clean machine installs, qa,
>> etc.
>>     
> ===
>
> FYI, the distutils/setuptools can build RPMs from the Python package
> (as defined by setup.py). It can also build Windows installer package
> on Windows, from the same code base and metadata.
>   
I've read that in several places but I haven't seen it work.  (I'm 
looking for debian's these days anyway).
> To make publicly available RPMs, .exe, .msi, etc., that are
> platform/distribution specific, would require a large "build farm"
> consisting of all the target platforms. I don't think that would be
> practical for the Python community.
>   
This is one of the ways that things work very well in debian.  If debian 
can do it, then so can the python community.

Actually, you probably don't need a server farm at all since the point 
here is that they can all be built in a cross configuration, yes?  So 
you just need a machine and that machine can generate any format available.
> Since Python is very cross-platform it actually makes sense to have its
> own packaging system that you can build target packages from.
I understand the argument.  My complaint is about the isolationism.  
Pypi packages should be available online, on demand, in any modern 
format.  It should be trivial to repackage them on the fly, which would 
also make them installable using the native method for your system, (so 
debian for debian, rpm for redhat, etc.)

--rich
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