[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?

[Bob Ippolito]

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