[Distutils] User Viewpoint: Packaging History, Confusion and User Advice

[Erik Bernoth]

Thanks everybody for your feedback!

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's not a bad summary, and
> http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/index.html looks like an
> excellent resource.
>

I'm going to write him an email pointing him to this thread. Maybe he's
interested in giving the text to the Python community. As far as I could
see it wasn't CC-BY-SA'd or something.

>
> We're currently trying to bring some order to the chaos, as described
> at
http://python-notes.boredomandlaziness.org/en/latest/pep_ideas/core_packaging_api.html
>

I love it! A good overview. It also clarifies general problems and
requirements for a packaging ecosystem. I also like the approach of taking
a step back and solving a problem that people faced, who tried to solve the
obvious problem. This approach is often quite useful in problem solving. A
lot of people can tackle the obvious parts of a problem set, but few people
are able to find the core problems and present them in a human readable
form. While reading I had the urge to convince you to go one more step back
in hope of solving problems a lot of people will face in the next steps,
which might not be obvious to you.

As I understand correctly you already have a lot of experience in and
around an RPM based packaging ecosystem. So you already know the
architecture of a solution to a problem set that is quite close to what the
python community has at the moment. This is not obvious to other people,
though. I bet an analysis of existing and working packaging ecosystems
would be really helpful in making plans. In the best case scenario it might
be possible to find a Lego-like system of best practices which can be
combined this way or another to weigh the pros and cons of each best
practice. I think this might be a much better approach then making a plan
out of what people guess might be a solution to existing problems. It's
hard work, compared to the documents and overviews you are preparing now it
might be even more inconvenient than writing those docs compared to
programming. But the pay off might also be enormous. I think it's like
writing PEPs something that doesn't result in working software directly but
enables a lot of other people to write better code, which indirectly solves
the coding challenge automatically.

What do you guys think about that?

>
> Our current status is that most of the key projects are being gathered
> under the "Python Packaging Authority" banner on Github and BitBucket.
>

I was already wondering what PyPA means.

>
> My essay linked above should eventually migrate to the meta-guide, and
> Scott's guide would be a useful link from the user guide (while it's
> desirable to have a "default" tutorial, linking to others can also be
> helpful for cases where the main guide doesn't make sense to users).
>
> Once the user guide and meta guide are in a better state, we'll update
> the stdlib distutils docs with a reference to them as a guide to a
> more up to date packaging toolchain.
>

How can I get involved in that work?

Both User Guide and Developer Hub didn't receive any commit this month, or
I am not able to review the repositories well enough? I'm new to bitbucket
and hg, so I have to ask: Is the current state of development checked in
there somewhere?
Also I don't see any Issues. Where are the current milestones (or
footsteps) written down and the progress tracked?

Regards,
Erik
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130425/09def63e/attachment.html>