[Distutils] Optimization and Auto-Upload (Any volunteers for Distutils maintainer?)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> 
> >BTW, I haven't followed your tools since IPC9 -- how is the
> >development coming along ?
> 
> Well, I initially figured that having the ability for users to easily
> get packages into the system was going to be necessary for people to start
> using it.  I worked like crazy on getting it done before the 2.1 release,
> but it didn't make it in to distutils for whatever reason...  I think only
> one package was ever published to the repository server by an outside user.
> 
> While at Python 9, I had assigned one of our tummy.folks to work on making
> a .deb packaging setup for Distutils, but he left a few days after we
> returned from Python 9.  I'm really the only other one here that can do it,
> and I haven't had time.

bdist_deb would be a cool thing to have... btw, would it run on 
RedHat or SuSE if I install the deb RPM packages there ?
 
> So, in all, it hasn't really gone anywhere.  I haven't really kept up on
> it.  The system I showed at Python 9 was not a rigged demo -- it was fully
> functional.  I think the biggest reason for it's failure was that I just
> didn't market it very well.
> 
> I actually built 2 systems that were heavily based on the swalow stuff.
> One was a software roll-out application, the other is a system for
> maintaining RPM-based systems (downloading packages and associated
> packages, upgrading to new versions of packages you have).  Both of these
> were fairly successful, so I think the technology behind swalow is fairly
> reasonable.  The RPM system gave me some opportunities to play around with
> dependencies, and I think a simple system like RedHat has would work fine
> for Python.
> 
> That's the story...

Thanks for the summary. I believe we should actively look into this
again after Python 2.2 is out the door. Does the swalow support come
as new distutils command or do you need deeper integeration for it
to work ?

Another interesting new command would be bdist_ppm for ActiveState's 
PPM format. I'll have to bug Paul Prescod again about this...

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
______________________________________________________________________
Consulting & Company:                           http://www.egenix.com/
Python Software:                        http://www.lemburg.com/python/