[Python-Dev] External Package Maintenance (was Re: Please stopchanging wsgiref on the trunk)

[Paul Moore]

On 6/12/06, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> > Maybe we should get serious about slimming down the core distribution
> > and having a separate group of people maintain sumo bundles containing
> > Python and lots of other stuff.
>
> there are already lots of people doing that (most Linux distributions add stuff, directly
> or indirectly; ActiveState and Enthought are doing that for windows, Nokia is doing
> that for the S60 platform, etc); the PEP 360 approach is an attempt to emulate that
> for the python.org distribution.

I'm not sure if it's a consequence of ActiveState's process, or of the
current state of Python library packaging, or something else, but one
big disadvantage I see to the ActiveState distribution is that it does
not allow upgrading of parts of their distribution (specifically, I
had problems because I couldn't upgrade pywin32 with a bugfix version,
as it clashed with their bundled version - this was in the days when
ActiveState releases were infrequent, and is probably much less of an
issue now).

Until that packaging issue is resolved (and again, maybe eggs provide
the answer here, I'm not sure) externally packaged sumo bundles have
some issues before they can fully replace the stdlib. I'd hate to
distribute something that had to depend on "Enthought Python" because
"ActiveState Python" was bundled with too old a release of pywin32 -
or whatever.

This is purely speculation (and fairly negative speculation at that!)
but I'd advocate caution for a while yet. Maybe ActiveState or
Enthought could provide some input on how/if sumo bundles can address
the need to upgrade "parts" of the distribution?

Paul.