[Distutils] GUI for Python package Management

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Jan 28, 2009, at 11:11 PM, <david.lyon at preisshare.net> <david.lyon at preisshare.net 
 > wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I am a developer from other languages and find myself on python now.
>
> I'm wondering if anybody has objections to doing a package  
> management gui
> for python.
>
> My design suggestions would be to:
>
> - use WXWidgets (cross compatability for most pythonic platforms)
> - provide a GUI wrapper for EasyInstall
> - source packages from http://pypi.python.org/pypi
>
> It seems we have most of the componentry in place. The problem seems  
> to be
> that it doesn't come together in a very user friendly way at the  
> moment
> that is cohesive.
>
> Can anybody/everybody flame/tell me why we shouldn't work to  
> simplify this
> area of python ?


I don't think that the missing of a gui is what is the problem today  
for python. Package uninstall is something that bothers some (maybe a  
lot) of users. Another point is to have something like webstart for  
java. If I understand how it works, running an application goes like  
this: If you open an app and it depends on another package not  
installed on your system java goes around and download the missing  
modules for you (and stores them in a relative place to the package or  
the user package dir) so the application can run. This would be cool  
for python, the problem being that there is no security to guarantee  
that those modules are not malicious in any way...

That is it, I would not opose to have a gui to install python modules,  
but I couldn't care less for one. There are a lot more pressing  
matters in the distutils/setuptools part of the python env than a gui.

--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com