[Python-Dev] Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB)

[Jan Claeys]

Op donderdag 30-11-2006 om 21:48 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Steve
Holden:
> I think the point is that some distros (Debian is the one that springs 
> to mind most readily, but I'm not a distro archivist) require a separate 
> install for distutils even though it's been a part of the standard 
> *Python* distro since 2.3 (2.2?)
> 
> So, it isn't that you can't get distutils, it's that you have to take an 
> extra step over and above installing Python. 

No, it just means that several parts of the python.org source package
are spread over several binary packages, just like happens with hundreds
or thousands of other packages, and any Debian (or Ubuntu or other
distro doing this) administrator worth his or her money should be aware
of that, and be able to find those packages.

E.g. on a debian "sarge" system:
        $ apt-cache showsrc python2.4 | grep Binary
        Binary: python2.4-doc, python2.4, python2.4-examples,
        python2.4-tk, python2.4-dev, idle-python2.4, python2.4-dbg,
        python2.4-gdbm
Or on an Ubuntu "edgy" system:
        $ apt-cache showsrc python2.4 | grep Binary
        Binary: python2.4-dbg, python2.4-dev, python2.4, python2.4-doc,
        idle-python2.4, python2.4-minimal, python2.4-examples

Probably the Debian maintainers could have named packages differently to
make things less confusing for newbies (e.g. by having the 'pythonX.Y'
packages being meta-packages that depend on all binary packages built
from the upstream source package), but that doesn't mean splitting
"python" (or other projects) up in several packages is wrong.  E.g. when
installing on an flash drive, people are probably quite happy to leave
the 20 MiB of Python documentation out...


Maybe python.org can include several logical "divisions" in the
python.org distribution and make it easy for OS distro packagers to make
separate packages if they want to, as most of them are quite happy to
have less work to do, provided the upstream "divisions" do more or less
what they want. ;-)   (Oh, and such a division should IMHO also include
a "minimal python" for embedded/low-resource hardware use, where things
like distutils, GUI toolkits, a colelction of 20 XML libraries and
documentation are most likely not needed.)


-- 
Jan Claeys