[Python-Dev] easy_install

[Talin]

Here's something to discuss:

First, let me say that I love easy_install. I absolutely "just works" 
and does what I want, and makes it really simple to install whatever bit 
of Python code I need.

At the same time, however, I get kind of scared when I hear people on 
the list discussing the various hacks needed to get setuputils and 
distutils et al all playing nice with each other (monkeypatching, etc.)

Having done a small bit of fiddling with distutils myself (as a user, I 
mean), I can see that while there's a terrific amount of effort put into 
it, its also not for the feignt of heart. That's not entirely distutil's 
fault - I gather that it's dealing with a lot of accumulated cruft (I 
imagine things like different and strange ways of archiving modules, 
dynamic modifications to path, all that sort of thing.)

It seems to me that if someone was going to spend some energy on this 
list coming up with proposals to improve Python, the thing that would 
have the most positive benefit in the long run (with the possible 
exception of Brett's work on rexec) would be a unified and clean vision 
of the whole import / package / download architecture.

Now, speaking from complete ignorance here, I might be way off base - it 
may be that this matter is well in hand, perhaps on some other mailing 
list. I don't know. In any case, I wanted to throw this out there...

-- Talin