[Distutils] [Python Language Summit] Distutils / Packaging survey

[David Cournapeau]

Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
>
> Hmm fair enough, I must have missed that last time I looked at the
> implementation of python-support and python-central.  But both take
> the burden of having to create a symlink farm because of this though.
> And to be honest I think the motivation for this is supporting
> multiple python versions without having to duplicate all .py files
> rather then the FHS.
>   

Yes, multiple-versions certainly motivated the split as well. I think
Fedora Core for example does not support multiple python versions (I
can't find a reference ATM), but I am not a user of rpm-based
distributions, so don't really know much about it and how they do it.

> But the great thing about the proposal is that it doesn't even matter.
> Files will be easily tagged/detected as "python modules" and "python
> extension modules" and the tools consuming this information can decide
> to do what they want with them.
>   

exactly. FHS is just one example - I suggested following autoconf
categories because that's the maximum flexibility, and can be used for
many cases, since it is a defacto standard (on Unix at least - but I
don't think we need to change much how things are done for Mac OS X and
Windows).

cheers,

David