[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Chris Withers]

This feels like a post relative to the catalog-sig too, or maybe even 
moreso than distutils-sig...

Chris

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I just found this comment on my blog. People have told me this in
> person too, so I believe it is real pain (even if the solution may be
> elusive and the suggested solutions may not work). But I don't know
> how to improve the world. Is the work on distutils-sig going to be
> enough? Or do we need some other kind of work in addition? Do we need
> more than PyPI?
> 
> --Guido
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: dalloliogm <noreply-comment at blogger.com>
> Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 8:01 AM
> Subject: [Neopythonic] New comment on Python in the Scientific World.
> To: gvanrossum at gmail.com
> 
> 
> dalloliogm has left a new comment on your post "Python in the Scientific World":
> 
> Python is suffering a lot in the scientific word, because it has not a
> CPAN-like repository.
> 
> PyPI is fine, but it is still far from the level of CPAN, CRAN,
> Bioconductor, etc..
> 
> Scientists who use programming usually have a lot of different
> interests and approaches, therefore it is really difficult to write a
> package that can be useful to everyone.
> Other programming language like Perl and R have repository-like
> structure which enable people to download packages easily, and to
> upload new ones and organize them withouth having to worry about
> having to integrate them into existing packages.
> 
> This is what is happening to biopython now: it is a monolitic package
> that it is supposed to work for any bioinformatic problem; but this is
> so general that to accomplish that you would need to add a lot of
> dependencies, to numpy, networkx, suds, any kind of library.
> However, since easy_install is not as ready yet as the counterparts in
> other languages, if the biopython developers add too many
> dependencies, nobody will be able to install it properly, and nobody
> will use it.
> 
> 
> 
> Posted by dalloliogm to Neopythonic at November 6, 2009 8:01 AM
> 
> 

-- 
Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting
            - http://www.simplistix.co.uk