[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?
Bob Ippolito
bob at redivi.com
Wed Feb 15 02:24:06 CET 2006
On Feb 14, 2006, at 5:00 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Joe Smith wrote:
>
>> Windows and RPM are known for major dependency problems, letting
>> packages
>> damage each other, having packages that do not uninstall cleanly
>> (i.e.
>> packages that leave junk all over the place) and generally messing
>> the sytem
>> up quite baddly over time, so that the OS is usually removed and
>> re-installed periodically.)
>
> I'm disappointed that the various Linux distributions
> still don't seem to have caught onto the very simple
> idea of *not* scattering files all over the place when
> installing something.
>
> MacOSX seems to be the only system so far that has got
> this right -- organising the system so that everything
> related to a given application or library can be kept
> under a single directory, clearly labelled with a
> version number.
>
> I haven't looked closely into eggs yet, but if they allow
> Python packages to be managed this way, and do it cross-
> platform, that's a very good reason to prefer using eggs
> over a platform-specific package format.
It should also be mentioned that eggs and platform-specific package
formats are absolutely not mutually exclusive. You could use apt/rpm/
ports/etc. to fetch/build/install eggs too. There are very few
reasons not to use eggs -- in theory anyway, the implementation isn't
finished yet.
The only things that really need to change are the packages like
Twisted, numpy, or SciPy that don't have a distutils-based main
setup.py... Technically, since egg is just a specification, they
could even implement it themselves without the help of setuptools
(though that seems like a bad approach).
-bob
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