[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Jeff Rush]

David Lyon wrote:
> 
> Even if you implement PyPI + PEP 381 + PEP 381 tomorrow I promise
> you that you won't be anywhere close to CPAN.
> 
> It's a much more serious challenge than perphaps you realise..

I keep reading and I keep hearing you and others saying this, but as
someone who has never used CPAN, I'm not seeing the large number of
specific implementable tasks that CPAN clearly has and PyPI clearly does
not.

Without handwaving please, in a technical sense what does CPAN have that
is so wonderful other than the items mentioned so far of:

 - buildbot on the server
 - mirrored. hierarchical servers
 - one widely known and accepted way of doing packaging

If we implement those, if we implement PEP 381, in what specific way
will we still fall *far short* as you suggest?  I can't fix the social
aspects so those are not of use to me.  Only architecture.

BTW at the recent pyTexas regional conference we had a good group
discussion about packaging, with people offering analysis from the Perl,
Java, Ruby and Haskell communities.  It seems each language still only
covers part of the solution, albeit different parts.

-Jeff