[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[David Arnold]

-->"Phillip" == Phillip J Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> writes:

  Phillip> I've only been getting the barest hint of what "crappy
  Phillip> packaging" consists of, except for the loud-and-clear message
  Phillip> that it's defined as Anything But Debian.  Since I'm
  Phillip> providing for users beyond Debian, that isn't useful
  Phillip> information and doesn't help me investigate fixing any
  Phillip> alleged crappiness.

>From here, the problem looks like:

Eggs provide a way of managing dependencies that is generic to Python,
across all platforms.  From a Python developer or user's viewpoint, this
is great.

Debs (and RPMs, and ebuilds, and PKGs, and so on) provide a way of
managing dependencies that are generic to a Unix distribution.  From a
Unix developer or user's viewpoint, this is great.

For each of these groups, the alternative approach is problematic.  


>From a Python-centric viewpoint, Debian's (and RedHat, Gentoo, Solaris,
etc) packaging mechanism, however great, covers only one of the many
possible platforms that an application might need to support.  

>From a Debian-centric viewpoint, dependency management is a solved
problem, with a decade of experience behind it, and proposing that
Python applications should have their dependencies managed separately is
blatantly foolhardy.


I kinda have a foot in both camps: I use Debian as my desktop, but I
produce Python apps and "libraries" for both Unix and Windows users.

So far as I know, Windows users don't have a standard way to manage
dependencies.  And to be fair, Windows users are far more numerous than
those of any Unix/Linux distribution.  So I can see the appeal of eggs,
both for a popular platform, and as a Python developer, as a
cross-platform do-it-once-only, mechanism.

But, as I've said (and I believe Phillip has acknowledged), from a Unix
point of view, this is problematic.


Tools to convert Python-centric, egg-managed dependency information into
Debian/Red Hat/Gentoo/Solaris/etc dependency information would appear to
help bridge this gap.  

I'm not convinced that's the case (I'm not sure how reasonable it is to
automatically convert 'require("FooBar>=1.2")' into the equivalent
Debian package names and versions, but my expectation is that it's no
more difficult than it currently is to package a "product" for Debian.


My point here is: both sides of this discussion have a valid point.  If
eggs are going to see the claimed rapid adoption (and I have no reason
to doubt the claims that this is happening), then systems that have an
existing dependency management system will need to cope.  Assistance
from the Egg People to make this happen can only be useful.


Finally, this is ignoring other possible uses of egg metadata, which
might end up being far more problematic?





d