[Distutils] "Python Package Management Sucks"

[David Cournapeau]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
> I think install tools should handle it and keep it out of developers'
> hair.  We should of course distinguish configuration and other
> writable data from static data, not to mention documentation.  Any
> other file-related info is going to have to be optional, if that.  I
> don't really think it's a good idea to ask developers to fill in
> information they don't understand.  A developer who works entirely on
> Windows, for example, is not going to have a clue what to specify for
> FHS stuff, and they absolutely shouldn't have to if all they're doing
> is including some static data. 

I may be missing something, but why should the developer even care about
FHS ? We should not standardize what goes where, but the kind of data
needed to be installed (doc, etc...), and then have different
(pluggable) implementations to put those where they should. Autotools
does it this way, for example: you have pkg_data, etc... and every one
of them can be changed. The proof that this is flexible is that fact
that something like GoboLinux (which is a bit like what Mac OS X handles
their files) is possible at all from the same sources.

http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=doc/articles/compile

I don't see the need for reinventing anything here: just start from the
same concepts as autotools, modify it to handle non unix softwares (if
it is even needed), and that's it.

cheers,

David