[Python-Dev] Update to Python Documentation Website Request

[Nick Coghlan]

David Lyon wrote:
> Your whole email whilst perphaps technically correct is terribly
> difficult for a software engineering person to follow.

It made perfect sense to me.

The words "eggs" brings with it a whole lot more baggage than just the
sum of the technical parts in the language core that support them
(primarily distutils and zipimport). I find it unfortunate that the name
for the distutils metadata format contains the word "egg" because it
implies much greater consensus around the philosophy behind eggs than
actually exists.

A lot of the baggage associated with the "eggs" concept is related to
the inherent conflict between different approaches to dependency management:
1. Use the system package management system for everything (preferred by
many, perhaps even most, *nix sysadmins, but not an option on Windows)
2. Create a Python specific package management system independent of the
system package manager (an area dominated by setuptools, including both
eggs and non-zipped package distributions)
3. Bundle everything into a monolithic application or framework (the
typical approach on Windows with py2exe, but also the philosophy behind
tools like virtualenv)

All 3 of those philosophies have good arguments in their favour and they
all have good arguments against them as well. Your comments about your
package management system suggest that it is just yet another entrant in
category 2 and you have said nothing to allay the concerns of those that
despise that philosophy with a passion because of the problems it causes
them when trying to manage their systems using the first philosophy.

Since the Python constituency includes developers and system
administrators that favour all 3 philosophies (and probably other
variants that I haven't thought to describe), anything that makes it
into the standard library will need to adequately balance the interests
of all parties (e.g. as has occurred in the PEP 376 metadata enhancement
discussions).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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