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

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:20:22PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2009, at 12:17 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> +1-enthusiastical-ly y'rs,

+1 too :-)

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