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

[David Cournapeau]

Chris Withers wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>> Chris Withers wrote:
>>> "even" seems to imply this is a basic requirement. I wonder how many
>>> people are rolling out python apps on Win64? I'm certainly not...
>>
>> Even was maybe a bit strong. Concerning win64, the first release of
>> numpy we did for win64 has been downloaded 3000 times, 
>
> By what? I'm always sceptical about the download figures on PyPI, and
> other places. I wonder how many bots are sucking down every .exe or
> .msi they can find to check for viruses or the like?

Sourceforge numbers. Besides, I can assure you that there is a lot of
interest in windows 64 for scientific computing (in terms of people
willing to pay).

> You should probably look at buildout, you may find your like getting a
> lot easier. Yes, the docs suck. I even promised to do something about
> that back at PyCon, sadly time has not been kind to my promises...

The docs are indeed less than ideal - everytime I tried to read
something about buildout, I could not even understand what it was about :)

But even though, I doubt buildout is what I am after: chroot-like
sandboxing for example, is crucial (and for what it worths, it is a
standard practice in the unix deployment world).

What I use is kind of besides the point, though. What matters is to have
a standard core on top of which people can build their tools: a core in
the stdlib, and buildout-based, scons-based, whatever-based tools on
top. If you have an API to retrieve where things are put, how they are
built and so on, everyone can be happy with the tool he prefers.


> Well, buildout.cfg is exacltly that file for me, for both cases ;-)

I may not have been clear: by single file, I mean an installer, which
needs to work offline, and is as integrated as possible in the user
system. This mean msi, dmg, rpm, etc... A buildout.cfg can't possible be
further from what I want in those cases.

David