[Distutils] Pre-pre-PEP: Requirements for the Python BUILDS Specification

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> Paul Moore wrote:
>> My feeling, by the way, is that "system packagers" are the more
>> relevant group on Linux/Unix (where most users install Python modules
>> via system packages, or else they are developers)
> 
> I think this is part of why I don't understand the system packager
> perspective.  Developers shouldn't use system packages, it just doesn't
> make any sense to have that intermediation.  Users don't use Python
> modules, they use applications.  Users only care that their applications
> work, that they can install applications without unnecessary conflicts,
> that the applications don't break based on unintentional environment
> changes (e.g., the value of PYTHONPATH).
> 
> Packagers seem to care a great deal about having applications share
> libraries on the packaging level, but this is for their own accounting,
> there's no reason for users to care (except for the too-small-to-matter
> issue of disk space).  Also, packagers seem to jump the gun on this
> library sharing, as they are concerned about libraries when one (or
> often zero!) applications depend on the library.  Some widely used
> libraries seem reasonable, but for every widely used library there are a
> dozen or more niche libraries.

There is a great deal of incentive for everything to use system
libraries.  take formencode-1.0 vs formencode-1.0.1 for instance.  If
every TurboGears application and whatnot that used formencode were using
their own copy of formencode-1.0 and then the discovery that
formencode-1.0 wasn't doing chained validators correctly came out, the
end users have to go about finding every copy of formencode and updating
it.  If there is only a single formencode library on the system and all
the TurboGears apps are using it, that's a single package that needs to
be updated.

>  Users also don't care about /usr/share
> or /usr/lib -- the only thing *I* ever care about is /usr/share/doc,
> /usr/bin, /etc, and maybe a man page.
> 

They do when user == system administrator.  Ask someone who manages
Linux systems at a large University if they care about the FHS and the
answer will be yes.  The various distinctions in the FHS between
writable vs nonwritable, architecture dependent vs architecture
independent, etc allow system administrators to maintain a large number
of systems with less pain.

-Toshio

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