[Distutils] Towards a bandersnatch release - updates, PIP, contacting mirror owners

[Christian Theune]

On 2013-04-08 01:09:44 +0000, Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy said:

> On Sun 07 Apr 2013 04:01:07 PM EDT, holger krekel wrote:
>> interpreted correctly.  Also, uploading a 1.0 release to pypi
>> would allow to say "pip install bandersnatch" instead of getting
>> the hg repo and the setup.py install command.
> 
> I agree, a PyPI package would make it easy for pip users.

Making an sdist and uploading it to PyPI isn't what I have trouble with:

The installation instructions that I provide are intended to help 
people operate (public) mirrors. I want to make it as smooth as 
possible and will likely have to respond to support requests when 
people have problems getting set up etc.

One of the biggest issues doing a service deployment is to get the 
dependency versions right. Fixing all versions in setup.py is too 
inflexible and I personally am happy with the way buildout solves this.

I would be happy to support a pip installation *if* I can make 
instructions that are as straight forward as the ones I'm giving for 
buildout and end up in people having predictable installations.

"pip install bandersnatch" will result in whatever dependency versions 
people happen to get. "pip install -r 
http://bitbucket.org/.../requirements.txt" is just close to the hellish 
"curl | bash".

Again: I'd be happy to support people if they prefer PIP for 
installation. Using a requirements.txt file I don't see much 
improvement from the "virtualenv, get the file, run it". Doing that 
with a tagged Mercurial checkout + buildout at least lets you catch up 
to newer releases more smoothly, no?

Regards,
Christian