[Numpy-discussion] Re: [SciPy-user] Future directions for SciPy in light of meeting at Berkeley

[Chris Barker]

John Hunter wrote:
>      I think we would want
>     contributions from people who do packaging on OSX and win32, eg
>     Bob Ippolito, Joe Cooper, Robert Kern, and others.

Just a note about this. For OS-X, Jack Jansen developed  PIMP, and the 
Package Manger App to go with it. Someone even made a wxPython based 
Packaged Manager app also. It was designed to be platform independent 
from the start. I think part of the idea was that if if caught on on the 
Mac, maybe it would be adopted elsewhere. I think it's worth looking at.

However... The PIMP database maintenance has not been going very well. 
In fact, to some extent it's been abandoned, and replaced with a set of 
native OS-X .mpkg files. These are easy to install, and familiar to Mac 
users. This supports my idea from long ago: what we need are simply a 
set of packages in a platform native format: Windows Installers, rpms, 
.debs, .mpkg, etc. Whenever this comes up, it seems like people focus on 
nifty technological solutions for a package repository, which makes 
sense as we're all a bunch of programmers, but I'm not sure it gets the 
job done. a simple web site you can download all the installers you need 
is fine.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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