[Python-Dev] splitting out bdist_* (was: interminable 'setuptools' thread)

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I do think that it's relevant that the respective operating system 
> packagers don't find bdist_rpm, bdist_deb, et. al. useful.  It's not 
> very useful to have a bdist_deb that nobody actually builds debs with. 

I think that conclusion is invalid: just because the distributions don't
use it doesn't mean that nobody uses it. As a data point, there are 16
packages on PyPI that release RPMs (I haven't checked how
they actually built them, though).

> This has been a problem for me, personally, since debian has made 
> various ad-hoc change to Twisted or Twisted-based packages to break our 
> plugin system, since the distutils metadata has been insufficient for 
> their purposes.  If the deb-generating stuff were in a separate project 
> with a faster release cycle that were easier to contribute packages to, 
> perhaps debian packagers could be convinced to contribute their build- 
> hacks there (and bdist_deb could invoke debhelper, or vice-versa).

I don't think this would happen. For .deb, you can't simply have
"deb-generating stuff" - you have to acually manually package each
file. The only way to get that out of the hands of the Debian maintainer
would be if the package author provided the necessary data, which
in turn requires that the "deb generating stuff" is readily available
to the package author.

In fact, .deb is a proof that it does *not* help to have the package
commands outside distutils. For .deb, the command actually *is* outside
distutils (there is no bdist_deb in distutils) - and it hasn't helped.

> It would be great if someone could volunteer to maintain this stuff 
> independently, put it in a Launchpad project or something.

Perhaps. However, for none of the bdist commands, anybody actually
volunteered to maintain them outside of distutils. I would not want
to see any of them removed until I know whom to blame when they
die after being removed :-)

> Given that py2exe and py2app (which includes "bdist_mpkg") are both 
> based on distutils, it seems like we're on the way to independent 
> maintenance anyway.  Perhaps bdist_wininst/_msi could be donated to the 
> py2exe project if they would be willing to maintain it, and the new 
> project for _deb and _rpm could be called "py2packman" or something.

Perhaps. I'm skeptical that they want it. Also notice that bdist_wininst
works fine on Linux, and I'm skeptical that Linux users would have easy
access to it if it became part of py2exe.

Regards,
Martin