[Distutils] "setup.py needs to go away" (was [PEP 376] - Open questions on python-dev)

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/10 Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com>:
> I don't think this perspective is reflective so much of web development as
> of application development.  Those of us who work on web applications need
> to provide working applications, often with hard scalability and reliability
> requirements.  We need to have control over how our applications are
> assembled so we can test known configurations and deploy them in a
> repeatable way. I think this would apply equally well to other sorts of
> applications.

On Windows, desktop applications generally use py2exe. While there are
issues for the *developer* in setting up a reproducible build
environment for py2exe, for the *end user* the application is
self-contained and as such the sort of deployment issues I assume you
are referring to don't exist.

So, from my POV, all of the machinery to manage multiple versions of
packages, isolated environments, etc, is inapplicable.

I'm not saying this means such concerns are invalid, merely supporting
David's point that different communities have different issues.

Paul