[Distutils] Dynamic linking between Python modules (was: Beyond wheels 1.0: helping downstream, FHS and more)

[Paul Moore]

On 17 May 2015 at 04:48, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> A large part of what *defines* a platform is making decisions about the ABI
> to publish & target. Linux distros, nix, conda do that for everything they
> redistribute. I assume chocolatey does as well

I'm picking on this because it seems to be a common misconception
about what Chocolatey provides on Windows.

As far as I understand, Chocolatey does *not* provide a "platform" in
this sense at all. The installers hosted by Chocolatey are typically
nothing more than repackaged upstream installers (or maybe just
scripting around downloading and running upstream installers
directly), with a nice command line means of discovering and
installing them.

>From the Chocolatey FAQ:

"""

What does Chocolatey do? Are you redistributing software?

Chocolatey does the same thing that you would do based on the package
instructions. This usually means going out and downloading an
installer from the official distribution point and then silently
installing it on your machine. With most packages this means
Chocolatey is not redistributing software because they are going to
the same distribution point that you yourself would go get the
software if you were performing this process manually.
"""

So AIUI, for example, if you install Python with Chocolatey, it just
downloads and runs the python.org installer behind the scenes.

Also, Chocolatey explicitly doesn't handle libraries - it is an
application installer only. So there's no dependency management, or
sharing of libraries beyond that which application installers do
natively.

Disclaimer: I haven't used Chocolatey much, except for some
experimenting. This is precisely *because* it doesn't add much beyond
application installs, which I'm pretty much happy handling myself. But
it does mean that I could have missed some aspects of what it
provides.

Paul