[Distutils] GUI for Python package Management

[Jeff Rush]

Ben Finney wrote:
> (Could you please set your name in your From field? Thanks.)
> 
> <david.lyon at preisshare.net> writes:
> 
>> >From the other perspective, it is a fairly trivial task for the gui to
>> track what packages it has installed - through it's own configuration file
>> and generate a manifest from that.
> 
> You mean, have packages tracked separately depending on which program
> was used to install them? That seems like a recipe for madness.

Agreed, manifest generation -has- to be done in the backend.

Also any such tracking of what is installed has to address the use case of
sandboxes into which different things are installed concurrently.  And it
needs to handle that some of those sandboxes are connected via wormholes to
the system Python site-packages.  I'm talking about the 'virtualenv' command
and its command-line option whether to let the system site-packages be
available as a last resort when searching for packages.

And having experience with Red Hat RPMs, you also should have a tool to
rebuild the registry of packages, say from .egg metadata, should the registry
be corrupted.

Not an easy problem at all to get right.

-Jeff