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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:35 PM, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> What's the problem with man files for python developers ? I am not
> saying that any developer is required to add a manpage, only that if
> she/he does though, that should be marked as man.

well, I do write some documentation for the commands I have in my
Python application,
but not as man files. Simple text files using the reStructuredText
format because it
is the "common" format in the Python world I guess.

I never bothered to write a man file. Maybe I should, but maybe the
system should
be smart enough and take my text file to make it a man file when it's
packaged in Debian or equivalent,

>
> That's quite simple, really: the python developer should not - does not
> -  have to care about FHS, windows, mac os X, whatever, only about
> marking correctly the different files: mark the pdf as pdf, html doc as
> html, etc... so that the *user* (the one executing setup.py) can choose
> whatever he wants, like for autoconf. You *can* do ./configure
> --mandir=bla --bindir=foo, but most people are fine with ./configure
> --prefix.
>
> It also means if the developer made a mistake in the setup.py, the
> package maintainer can fix the problem in the setup.py, and sent a patch
> upstream (so any platform is fixed). IMHO, that's really a part of
> distutils where explicitly avoiding any policy (where to install what)
> makes sense, and should be relatively easy to implement.
>

Right. From a Python developer point of view, that could maybe be
done in setup.py as long as we have the mechanism to find back all pieces
to work in the code.

>> Would you like to write down a detail description of that feature as well ?
>
> I am not sure I will have time to do it - I may underestimate the
> difficult of some things because I am not familiar with distutils
> implementation for install-related commands. Doing a description without
> any design proposal would certainly be possible, though.
>

A description would be great as well for sure :)

Cheers
Tarek


-- 
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/