[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 24 novembre 2005 à 11:46 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> No, what's happening is that you're not paying attention, because you 
> believe that Debian already solves those problems, even though it doesn't 
> solve them for Python developers who want their projects to be usable on 
> every platform.  

While solving a "problem" (which problem?) for other systems, you've
just created a new problem for all Linux distributions.

> You're also ignoring my repeated explanations about how 
> plugins work, and why Debian doesn't help with that problem either.

You haven't given any useful explanation so far.

> And finally, and most importantly, you're ignoring the fact that this 
> discussion began because a Debian developer wanted to package a successful 
> egg-using project and its dependencies.  Nobody came to you asking for your 
> blessing to package eggs or your approval of how useful eggs are; somebody 
> came and asked me for help in getting this to work with Debian.  Help which 
> I've been giving.

My preoccupation is to have a clean integration of all python packages
in Debian. Something you've not been helpful about, proposing to change
the clean, correct way python modules are packaged so that they can deal
with your "improvements".

> For some reason, however, you seem to think that you are actually in a 
> position to pass judgment on the usefulness of eggs.  If their usefulness 
> were in any meaningful question, we wouldn't be having this conversation in 
> the first place!

You have to bear with it. In the open source world, anyone can come and
discuss the usefulness of your project. This won't happen if your
project isn't causing trouble to other projects, but when you're talking
about breaking the python packaging practises in Debian, I think any
Debian developer has the moral right to discuss your suggestions. I have
seen the nightmare that mozilla extensions packaging can become, and I
urge maintainers of python-related packages not to rush into egg
packaging, as it is obviously going to reach a similar level of
insanity.

> I've been answering Martin's posts to kill FUD and to make progress where 
> progress could be made.  But your posts aren't spreading any FUD I haven't 
> already answered, and you're clearly not interested in making any progress, 
> so I don't see any point in wasting either of our time any further on this 
> thread.  Nonetheless, I remain committed to helping any system integrator - 
> Debian included - in helping their users by allowing them to satisfy egg 
> dependencies using their existing packages, as well as in packaging 
> egg-based projects in ways that work, not only for the project, but for the 
> system integrator.

You should demonstrate that will, instead of repeatedly proposing
suggestions that are simply not implementable.

> In other words, setuptools 0.6a9 will have the features that at least 
> Martin and Matthias have suggested will be an acceptable solution for 
> packaging projects that explicitly contain egg metadata (such as 
> FormEncode), and will also allow older Python packages to add dependency 
> metadata with a single empty file.

Why the hell would a package having nothing to do with yours would have
to add a file - especially an empty file - to cope with it? Again,
intra-package dependencies is *not* something useful for us,
distributors. They have repeatedly proved to be unreliable, in many
contexts.

Regards,
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
   `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom