Strong and weak points of distutils 1 Was: [Distutils] thoughtson distutils 1 & 2

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 11:18:46AM +0100, Moore, Paul wrote:
> What, specifically, do you need the OS to provide, and why? What real
> problem exists with the current system? (At least in the context of
> the "build a standard OS package" commands, like bdist_wininst, bdist_rpm,
> etc). The only major issue I see is dependency management, and, personally,
> I'm happy to treat this as a documentation issue (package X documents that
> it relies on package Y, version a.b or later, and package Z, version c.d).
> Of course, I don't want automatic downloading of dependencies, uninstalling
> of dependencies when a package is uninstalled, etc, which maybe others do...

In my view of the perfect world, the OS tools would deal with
dependencies based on the metadata provided by the binary packages. This
is how apt-get works. It wraps around dpkg and/or rpm. The .deb and .rpm
packages provide the metadata and apt goes and gets whatever is
necessary. It does not prevent people from pulling down individual .deb
or .rpm files and working their way through (or even overriding)
dependencies, if that's what they want to do. Nor is it required that
you have an automatic dependency resolver ala apt. Since Windows does
not provide that ability natively, then Distutils need not try to extend
Windows to include it. Although an independent "apt-for-Windows" type
too would, I'm sure, be appreciated by Windows users, it is not
necessary for Windows package management any more than apt is required
for .deb or .rpm management. RPM managed quite well for some time
before apt-like tools became available -- It's only advantage over
Windows "Add/Remove Programs" was dependency checking (not dependency
resolution).

This is why I believe the core value of Distutils is the simple management
of package metadata. Building, installing or making binary packages are
all actions based on the supplied metadata. How the result is integrated
into any particular platform should be as native as possible for each
platform.

mwa
-- 
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net

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