[Distutils] Role of setuptools and eggs in "modern" distributing...

[Nick Coghlan]

On 31 Dec 2014 10:43, "Chris Barker" <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> But the core problem here is that the scipy folks have been going to
conda and enthought to solve their pacakgeing problems, and the web folks
have been doing pip, and maybe buildout -- so you get a bit of mess when
you mix them.

The problem always existed - it's the longstanding conflict between
"platform independent, language specific" tooling and "platform specific,
language independent" tooling.

The former is often preferred on the developer side (since the tools are
oriented towards building individual custom applications rather than
maintaining a suite of applications written by different groups), while the
latter is essential on the system integrator side (since you're dealing
with inevitable technology sprawl in infrastructure that evolves over the
course of years and decades).

One of the best things coming out of the whole "DevOps" notion is the
recognition that language independence and platform independence are aimed
at solving *different problems*, and that what we need is suitable tools
with different roles and responsibilities that interoperate effectively,
rather than attempting to provide a single universal tool and having
different groups of users yelling at each other for wanting to solve the
"wrong" problem.

Tools like conda and zc.buildout fit into that landscape by aiming to
provide a platform & language independent approach to doing *application*
level integration, which tends to have the effect of making them new
platforms in their own right. If you compare them to Linux distributions,
then zc.buildout is a platform that practices the Gentoo style approach of
building everything from source for each application, while conda uses the
more common Debian/Fedora style of defining a binary packaging format that
allows a redistributor to handle the build process on behalf of their users.

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. conda's actually one of the projects on my preliminary short list for
consideration as a possible userspace package management tool in Fedora:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Env_and_Stacks/Projects/UserLevelPackageManagement#Recommending_language_independent_tooling_.28longer_term.29
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