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

[Lennart Regebro]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:05, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> I meant that instead of installing almost everything indistinctly like
> we do now with distutils/setuptools, we should have something like:
>
> python setup.py install --bindir=foodir --sbindir=bardir --mandir=mandir
> ....

I think this shows how different the goals are for linux packaging and
python packaging. Python packaging is mostly about installing python
libraries, linux packaging is mostly about distributing applications
(or indeed a whole OS). But maybe these options should be there, so
that we can get disutils to nicely distribute applications on Linux as
well?

It would mean that we from a python setup.py command would be able to
create both Windows distros and Linux distros and maybe even OS X
distros once you set up setup.py correctly. Which would be *some* kind
of awesome, although I'm not entirely sure which kind. :)


I'm entirely sure that the Debian people would not just run a
automated debian packager from a setup.py, at least not the first
couple of years until they are sure it works. But that doesn't mean
it's not a good thing to have. I regularily install WingIDE from the
Ubuntu deb-files, even though they are not distributed in the Ubuntu
repository. If you make a python library that has a Ubuntu/debian/red
hat/something distro, you might want to release new versions in a way
that is compatible with this package, even though somebody else made
the package. Or would that make the Linux people very unhappy?

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Zope and Plone consulting.
http://www.colliberty.com/
+33 661 58 14 64