[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:34 PM 4/22/2006 +0200, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>Ian Bicking wrote:
>
> > For instance, if you really want to be confident about how your libraries
> > are layed out, this script is the most reliable way:
> > http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/virtual-python.py
>
>note the use of "this script is the most reliable way", not "something
>like this script", or "you have to do this, see e.g."

Picky, picky, picky.  As it happens, EasyInstall's documentation used to 
just explain the steps, and people would complain about how hard it 
was.  Ian wrote a script to do it automatically, and I touched it up a bit 
for distribution.

While I personally wouldn't have said it the same way Ian did, there is 
nonetheless a point to his saying it in that way.  If you are giving people 
help, you don't give ambiguous recommendations.  More to the point, you 
don't tell somebody to reinvent something that already exists.  If they 
were the reinventing type, they'd have already read the documentation and 
either decided to use the tool or not, to tweak it or not, etc., on their 
own, rather than asking on a mailing list for help.

So your projection of attitudes here has nothing to do with Ian.


>(frankly, do you think there's any experienced developer out there
>whos first thought when asked the question "how do I create a tightly
>controlled Python environment" isn't either "can I solve this by tweaking
>sys.path in my application?" or "disk space is cheap, bugs are expensive;
>let's use a separate install", spends 15 minutes setting that up, checks
>in the result, and goes back to working on the hard stuff...)

Clearly, we're not dealing with "experienced" developers, then.  Of course 
even now that it's easy to *do*, some people still gripe that setting up a 
separate install is too "heavy".  (Except the audience for whom the script 
was intended, who consider it a godsend.)  Some people are never satisfied, 
obviously.

Anyway, while we're projecting about people's attitudes, what's with this 
"Real Programmers Should Build It Themselves" attitude?  What are you, some 
kind of Lisp programmer?  ;)