[Distutils] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip)

[Chris Withers]

[adding in disutils-sig and leaving this message intact as that's where 
it belongs]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 2009/10/20 Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com>:
>> FWIW, I don't think there's a real conflict here.  My understanding is
>> that wininst installers can be treated as installable packages that
>> don't *have* to go through the system package manager, so they are
>> both installable system-wide and installable much like an egg or
>> tarball is (you can't drop the wininst installer into the path
>> directly like you can an egg, but that doesn't seem to be a
>> widely-held goal).
> 
> The conflict lies in the fact that I want the features that
> bdist_wininst installers give me (integration with add/remove programs
> and uninstallation) [1]. If every project offers a bdist_wininst
> installer, I'm happy. But Chris isn't unless they provide his
> preferred format (I'm not sure if Chris has a concrete suggestion, or
> he's just speculating at the moment) as well.

Huh? I don't really care how packages are installed, provided they end 
up in a consistent format on disk. I'm not sure how a bdist_wininst 
installer is going to make sure a package's dependencies are met though...

> I'm assuming (based on experience with eggs) that projects won't
> routinely provide all possible formats. Hence my contention that a
> single format is necessary.
> 
> Having multiple package management systems that consume that format is
> fine by me. But easy_install can consume bdist_wininst installers, so
> the evidence is that there's more needed for a single format to emerge
> than has been done so far (otherwise why isn't bdist_wininst that
> single format right now?)

Because not everyone runs on Windows?

Chris

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