[Python-Dev] Integrate BeautifulSoup into stdlib?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>>> I am afraid that distutils, and
>>> setuptools, are not really the answer to the problem, since while they
>>> may (as intended) guarantee that Python applications can be installed
>>> uniformly across different platforms they also more or less guarantee
>>> that Python applications are installed differently from all other
>>> applications on the platform.
>> I think they should be part of the solution, in the sense that they
>> should allow easier packaging for the different platforms (linux,
>> windows, mac os x and so on). For now, they make things much harder
>> than they should (difficult to follow the FHS, etc...).
> 
> FHS is something which packagers / distributors care about:  I strongly
> doubt that the "end users" will ever notice, particularly for silliness
> like 'bin' vs. 'sbin', or architecture-specific vs. 'noarch' rules.
> 
That's because you're thinking of a different class of end-user than FHS
 is targeting.  Someone who wants to install a web application on a
limited number of machines (one in the home-desktop scenario) or someone
who makes their living helping people to install the software they've
written has a whole different view on things than someone who's trying
to install and maintain the software on fifteen computer labs in a
campus or the person who is trying to write software that is portable to
tens of different platforms in their spare time and every bit of
answering end user's questions, tracking other upstreams for security
bugs, etc, is time taken away from coding.

Following FHS means that the software will work for both "end-users" who
don't care about the nitty-gritty of the FHS and system administrators
of large sites.  Disregarding the FHS because it is "silliness" means
that system administrators are going to have to special-case your
application, decide not to install it at all, or pay someone else to
support it.

Note that those things do make sense sometimes.  For instance, when an
application is not intended to be distributed to a large number of
outside entities (facebook, flikr, etc) or when your revenue stream is
making money from installing and administering a piece of software for
other companies.

-Toshio

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