[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

Jannis Leidel jannis at leidel.info
Sun Nov 8 00:32:02 CET 2009


Am 08.11.2009 um 00:18 schrieb Kevin Teague:

> One other really nice thing about the Perl packaging ecosystem is  
> that their standard library is packaged!
>
> If there is a bug found in the Perl standard library, it's trivial  
> to upgrade it to a newer release with a bug fix. For example, the  
> recent little distutils snafu would have been a lot less painful for  
> the end user's if we'd been able to get the bug fix with a simple:
>
> $ pip install --upgrade distutils
>
> In this respect, from an end user perspective, it really feels like  
> you're getting hit with a stick, "Need that distutils fix? Hmm,  
> well, OK, but you're going to have wait another month until we do a  
> full Python release, and then accept all these other unrelated  
> changes if you want that ... "
>
> CPAN even informs you if there's a newer release of itself  
> available, and suggests you might like to upgrade:
>
>  There's a new CPAN.pm version (v1.9402) available!
>  [Current version is v1.7602]
>  You might want to try
>    install Bundle::CPAN
>    reload cpan
>  without quitting the current session. It should be a seamless upgrade
>  while we are running...
>
> Buildout has a similar upgrade notification feature, but I don't  
> think pip or easy_install does? One nice thing about setuptools (or  
> now distribute) not having been merged into the standard library is  
> that they're easy to update to newer releases. As we push more of  
> this code down into Distutils, we are making it more difficult to  
> get updates :(

Oh, intriguing idea, has moving distutils out of Python core been  
considered before?

Jannis


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