[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

In line with this discussion, I found a document that details the aspects  
of CPAN that can be used for writing packaging systems in other languages.  
The author says: over the years people from at least Python, Ruby, and  
Java communities have approached me or other core CPAN people to ask  
basically "How did we do it?

   http://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html

-srid

On Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:53:44 -0800, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>  
wrote:

> I just found this comment on my blog. People have told me this in
> person too, so I believe it is real pain (even if the solution may be
> elusive and the suggested solutions may not work). But I don't know
> how to improve the world. Is the work on distutils-sig going to be
> enough? Or do we need some other kind of work in addition? Do we need
> more than PyPI?
>
> --Guido
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: dalloliogm <noreply-comment at blogger.com>
> Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 8:01 AM
> Subject: [Neopythonic] New comment on Python in the Scientific World.
> To: gvanrossum at gmail.com
>
>
> dalloliogm has left a new comment on your post "Python in the Scientific  
> World":
>
> Python is suffering a lot in the scientific word, because it has not a
> CPAN-like repository.
>
> PyPI is fine, but it is still far from the level of CPAN, CRAN,
> Bioconductor, etc..
>
> Scientists who use programming usually have a lot of different
> interests and approaches, therefore it is really difficult to write a
> package that can be useful to everyone.
> Other programming language like Perl and R have repository-like
> structure which enable people to download packages easily, and to
> upload new ones and organize them withouth having to worry about
> having to integrate them into existing packages.
>
> This is what is happening to biopython now: it is a monolitic package
> that it is supposed to work for any bioinformatic problem; but this is
> so general that to accomplish that you would need to add a lot of
> dependencies, to numpy, networkx, suds, any kind of library.
> However, since easy_install is not as ready yet as the counterparts in
> other languages, if the biopython developers add too many
> dependencies, nobody will be able to install it properly, and nobody
> will use it.
>
>
>
> Posted by dalloliogm to Neopythonic at November 6, 2009 8:01 AM
>
>