[Numpy-discussion] [matplotlib-devel] Announcing toydist, improving distribution and packaging situation

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Stefan Schwarzburg
<stefan.schwarzburg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to add a comment from the user perspective:
>
> - the main reason why I'm not satisfied with pypi/distutils/etc. and why I
> will not be satisfied with toydist (with the features you listed), is that
> they break my installation (debian/ubuntu).

Toydist (or distutils) does not break anything as is. It would be like
saying make breaks debian - it does not make much sense. As stated,
one of the goal of giving up distutils is to make packaging by os
vendors easier. In particular, by allowing to follow the FHS, and
making things more consistent. It should be possible to automatically
convert most packages to .deb (or .rpm) relatively easily. When you
look at the numpy .deb package, most of the issues are distutils
issues, and almost everything else can be done automatically.

Note that even ignoring the windows problem, there are systems to do
the kind of things I am talking about for linux-only systems (the
opensuse build service), because distributions are not always really
good at tracking fast changing softwares. IOW, traditional linux
packaging has some issues as well. And anyway, nothing prevents debian
or other OS vendors to package things as they want (as they do for R
packages).

David