[Python-Dev] Refactoring installation schemes

[David Lyon]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 17:40:35 -0500, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:

> The packaging story is in such bad shape that it needs the work
> regardless, and keeping it to Python 3 would significantly reduce the
> set of potential volunteers.

Well I guess that is a 'marketing decision'. Not a coding issue.

Actually, I don't honestly think that there is a lack of volounteers
or any lack of resources.

The main challenge imho is to get peoples bikesheds (including my own
bikeshed) to line up in such a way that people can ride together
sharing some sort of parts. 

Tarek has been doing just fine at facilitating this.

> There's certainly work on that, but... is it that people hate the
> format?  Or working with setuptools?

In my experience, working with the setuptools implementation is
the difficult part. There's a barrage of impossible to remember
command line options and the documentation is imho more convoluted
than it needs to be.

Let me put the distutils documentation forward as some sort of
reference as to where the setuptools documentation should be.

Then, there are some relatively minor issues that just annoy
users to no end. The simple one is that they live in your
site-packages directory unpacked. People wouldn't have so
many issues if they lived like every other 'normal' package.

As for the format itself, there's nothing to hate that I
can see.

> The fact that there's more than one egg format doesn't help, so you
> may be right.

Yes. The implementation can be confusing. That's the only
problem imo.

>> Call it the new Tarek egg...
> 
> The tegg?  ;-)

l'oeuf ?

In summmary, it doesn't matter so much what an 'egg' is.

All that is important is that it works on lots of python
platforms, distutils can easily pop them out, they are well
documented and relatively trouble free.

Most importantly, credit for the original idea goes back
to PJE and everything gets refactored to make it 'nice'.

I don't think it's a massive refactoring operation myself,
and I'm very sure well within Tareks skillset to take on.

David