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

[Paul Moore]

2009/2/2 David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>:
> I never said it was self-evident. And about the part of determining what
> the right place is: the whole point is that you, as a developer, won't
> have to care :) Only by changing the distutils implementation and adding
> some options to the install command, but without changing *anything* in
> the setup.py, would many if not most python softwares be easier to
> install along the FHS. And where something is missing, the *packager*
> could send a patch to fix some metadata upstream, instead of keeping
> their changes separately.
>
> If you don't have any experience with autotools, it is a bit hard to go
> into details, but you almost never care about what goes where for the
> most part. You just tag some files as programs, some as docs, etc...
> Most of it being implicit.

I suspect that people involved in this discussion don't really
appreciate just how confusing these fine points can be, particularly
for Windows developers who have no concept of the differences (in
terms of a filesystem hierarchy that expresses it). I know that, in
some sense it's "obvious" that a file is documentation or code - but
what about a README? It may be "documentation", but it "obviously", to
me as a Windos developer, wants to go "with the code", not "with the
documentation". And what about sample code? Code or documentation?

As Ian points out, you are asking people to care about something that,
at the moment, we don't have to. "Easy" or not.

Paul.