[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> In private email, Phillip Eby suggested to add these things to the
> 2.5. standard library:
> 
> bdist_deb, bdist_msi, and friends
[...]
> I guess bdist_egg should also be added if we support setuptools (not
> setuplib as I mistakenly called it previously)? 

I'm in favour of that (and not only because I wrote bdist_msi :-).
I think distutils should support all native package formats we can
get code for.

I'm actually opposed to bdist_egg, from a conceptual point of view.
I think it is wrong if Python creates its own packaging format
(just as it was wrong that Java created jar files - but they are
without deployment procedures even today). The burden should be
on developer's side, for creating packages for the various systems,
not on the users side, when each software comes with its own
deployment infrastructure.

OTOH, users are fond of eggs, for reasons that I haven't yet
understood.

>From a release management point of view, I would still like to
make another bdist_msi release before contributing it to Python.

Regards,
Martin