[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip)

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> I'm coming in late and breaking threading, but wanted to reply to
> Tarek's original email:
>
>> - easy_install is going to be deprecated ! use Pip !
>
> Cool!  I wouldn't have written pip if I didn't think it would improve
> substantially on easy_install.
>
> Incidentally (because I know people get really enthused about this)
> Carl Meyer just contributed a feature to pip to do atomic
> uninstallation.

Yes I saw that, it's great. And he is now involved in PEP 376 work so
Pip could eventually become the first PEP 376 compliant installer/uninstaller.

>
> Someone mentioned that easy_install provided some things pip didn't;
> outside of multi-versioned installs (which I'm not very enthusiastic
> about) I'm not sure what this is?

Basically what you've listed on Pip front page I think, like 'not
tested under windows'
But I don't see any blocking point besides some testing, to move from
easy_install to pip,
and the deprecation of multi-versioned feature seem to go in the
direction of the community.

>>    - distribute.index: that's package_index and a few other things. everything required to interact with PyPI. We will promote
>>      its usage and see if Pip wants to use it as a basis.
>
> This is a little tricky.  Primarily because there's a fair amount of
> logic involved in the indexing (going around to different URLs,
> parsing links, finding stuff).  So long as there is logic, something
> can go wrong -- often not in the package itself, but simple user error
> (e.g., it doesn't look where the user thinks it should, or a link is
> malformed, etc).  Because of this, and as a general design goal of
> pip, I want to show as much as I can about what it is doing and why.
> This is primarily tied into pip's logging system (which is oriented
> towards command-line output, and isn't the standard logging system).
> Also it tracks *why* it got to a certain links.  These are the two
> things I can think of where the index code in pip is tied to pip, and
> why it would be hard to use an external system.

OK. Maybe this particular package could be used by another tool
that needs to work with PyPI. It will also include a set of APIs that
corresponds to PyPI XMLPRC services.

Regards
Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org | オープンソースはすごい! | 开源传万世，因有你参与