[Distutils] zc.buildout and "System Python"

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:22:58AM -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
> 
>   It occurs to me that it would be nice if we made clean Python
>   packages available for some of the popular Unix platforms.  I'm not
>   sure what would be involved in doing that, from a distribution point
>   of view.
> 
If you're talking about a python that is carried by the OS in their package
sets, updatable using the OS tools, etc catch me on IRC (abadger1999 on
irc.freenode.net) and we could talk about this.  Off the top of my head,
I think it would be possible with a few compromises but not easy in the
decision department.  For instance, distributions have rules such as "don't
bundle libraries that are available on the system" that would apply to
things like libffi which are built from within python by default.  Or the
use of wide-unicode which isn't the default in a vanilla upstream build but
is the default on the Linux distributions that I know of.  Or the use of
multilib which makes for a split directory layout for libraries instead of
a single location.

The biggest issue I see is that it wouldn't be possible to fix bugs in
these packages.  Perhaps it would be possible to compromise and fix bugs but
only when the patches are backports from the upstream repository but.... we
presently do that in Fedora for firefox/xulrunner/thunderbird because of
mozilla's trademark agreement and it causes no end of conflicts between
contributors.

-Toshio
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