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

[Steve Holden]

Jan Claeys wrote:
[...]
> 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...
> 
Right, who cares about newbies, they're only the future of the language, 
after all. I take your point that some flexibility is advantageous once 
you get past the newbie stage, but I think that here we are talking 
about trying to avoid mis-steps that will potentially put people off 
making that transition.
> 
> 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.)
> 
> 
If only there were some guarantee that the distros would respect any 
project partitioning imposed by python-deb we might stand a chance of 
resolving these issues.

By and large they do tend to go their own way, though. I suppose the 
only alternative is prominently-posted materials on python.org about 
"Python on Debian", "Python on Ubuntu", ... and various addition to the 
FAQs.

regards
  Steve
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