[Distutils] Packaging: bdist_deb patches / platform specific code

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Jun 8, 2009, at 8:50 PM, David Lyon wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Jun 2009 14:28:52 +0200, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> During the summit at Pycon, we have said that it would be a better
>> strategy not to include
>> within Distutils os-specific tools for various reasons (and also to
>> remove existing ones) :
>>
>> - it's better for them to have their own release cycles
>> - it's hard for me, as distutils maintainer, to maintain and make
>> evolve os-specific tools. People that are specialists on those OS
>>  will do a better job.
>
> Let's think about this.... and what it means.....
>
> It seems that this direction comes down to "we don't want to  
> maintain it"
> rather than anything else.
>
> The whole point of distutils is to be able to make up a package in
> such a way that it can be distributed to every platform.... right?
>
> So removing the code that is specific to specific platforms is just
> collapsing the whole project.
>
> Rather than "removing" platform specific code... and rendering
> distutils crippled... why not work on developing the code so that
> it operates more like a "cross-compiler"...
>
> That is...
>
> runs on any platform...
>
> builds for any platform....


Because this is almost impossible... for example building a win_inst  
package on linux (let alone other unixes, etc) is very very hard  
(specially if it involves extensions), the same for rpm, deb and mpkg.

Distutils should provide all tools to make this happen, but the  
package creation itself should be let to each system. This is the same  
problem with svn and setuptools where you end up with non working code  
for long periods of time. Now that python and probably a ton of other  
projects are going to use mercurial this can even become worse.

--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com