[Distutils] pre-PEP : Synthesis of previous threads, and irc talks + proposals

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:04 PM, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
>> 5/ ideally, they should be one and only one version of a given package
>> in an OS-based installation
>
> -1 -- This is the strong preference of the folks who package software for
> OSes -- Debian, Fedora, etc. -- but it is not necessarily the choice of the
> users who use their OSes.  It is best for the Python packaging standards to
> be agnostic towards this, or at least to support both this desideratum and
> its opposite.

I can see this as an exponentional problem for packagers, but let's
think about it:

- How you would handle several version of the same package in Python then ?

- How each application would pick the right version ?

- How would you decide which version is the one by default ?

That is the core of the problem.

The -m feature of setuptools is nice, but it activates one version at
a time, and
this is globlal to Python unless each application is handling the
version switch,
wich is pretty heavy.

A programmable sys.path ?

Tarek.