[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Josselin Mouette]

Le mardi 22 novembre 2005 à 17:05 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> And over the last few months, I believe we've also succeeded in stomping 
> most of the issues that people had with getting solid non-root 
> installations on their Linux distributions.  So the reasons for developers 
> to prefer their dependencies to be managed as eggs will only improve over 
> time, as the egg system allows Python developers to control and introspect 
> their dependencies, rather than keeping that information hidden behind 
> diverse platform-specific packaging tools.

This is useful for non-root installations, but it is only a hassle when
you are making .deb's. Here, dependencies are already handled, and you
rely on the system to provide correct versions for packages you depend
upon.

> It's only "competitive" if you feel that there must be only one way to do 
> it.  (And if you do feel that way, then it also should be obvious that eggs 
> are the superior solution, since they don't take away any capabilities of 
> the old, only provide new ones.)

They only introduce more complexity, instead of bringing real features.

> Obviously, every individual distribution would like to have Python packages 
> conform to their individual system.  However, on the whole, it is clearly 
> better for the Python developer to have practical dependency management 
> that doesn't tie their efforts to a single platform, packaging system, or 
> distribution.

And that's why there are things like dh_python to adapt python distutils
installations to be compliant to the Debian way of things. However, eggs
make it so complicated that the adaptation layer would be
unmaintainable. This is a good reason to think the whole egg system
should be avoided.
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
   `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom