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

[Tres Seaver]

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Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2009, at 8:57 AM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> 
>> Le mercredi 28 janvier 2009 à 08:07 -0500, Barry Warsaw a écrit :
>>> I'd like to make a radical suggestion: upstream authors should never
>>> have to worry about building distribution blobs.
>> This is just silly. You dont have to worry about the distributions
>> internals, and what is specific to each package format, but the very
>> idea of developing without any kind of knowledge about how the  
>> software
>> will integrate on a system is a guaranteed recipe for a development
>> disaster.
> 
> That's not what I'm saying.  What I'm really saying is that I don't  
> want to have to run 5 different setup.py commands every time I do a  
> release in order to upload all the possible distribution formats that  
> my users may want.

I would argue that the upstream developer should (almost) never be
uploading anything but a metadata-rich sdist:  except for packages with
C extensions, nobody really needs anything else for "library" packages,
and it's really only the Windows folks who can't build those binaries
for themselves.

People distributing applications might want to provide installers, I
guess, for the command-line challenged.

Otherwise, if we provided enough metadata in the sdist, packagers can
build the other formats (.deb, .rpm, etc.) for us, assuming that we can
solve the "resource file" problem.


Tres.
- --
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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