[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] packaging terminology confusion

P.J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Jan 7 17:44:24 CET 2010


At 10:29 AM 1/7/2010 -0600, Brad Allen wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:12 AM, John Gabriele <jmg3000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:52 PM, John Gabriele <jmg3000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> The only inconsistency, I think, is that operating systems like Debian
> >>> refer to their software distributions as "packages" (as in, a packaged
> >>> up piece of software that you can download and install). "Packages" is
> >>> a great name for them -- too bad it's already being used in Python.
> >>
> >> I believe that's basically where the confusion comes from.
> >
> > Whoops. Just noticed that the front page of the PyPI says:
> >
> >> "There are currently 8614 packages here."
> >
> > (is that 8614 packages or 8614 distributions?)

8614 *projects*, some of which have one or more *versions*, which in 
turn may have one or more source or binary *distributions*.  That at 
least is the terminology that setuptools and distribute use in their 
documentation at the moment.



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