[Python-Dev] Bazaar branches available (again) on Launchpad

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jan 20, 2010, at 02:43 PM, David Lyon wrote:

>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Jesse Noller wrote:

>> A SCM is not a "package management system".
>
>Exactly. It almost makes the need for a "package management system"
>pretty much obsolete if you can update your code directly from
>the developers sources.
>
>That's what all these SCMs provide. Plus it's addictive. It's
>hard to go back to 'package' style technology once you have
>all your code on an SCM based feed.

Well...  I'm not so sure.  A package management system like apt does a /ton/
of additional bookkeeping and work to ensure a robust, highly consistent,
functioning system.  And while both Python and most Linux distributions have
their own notion of "package management", they don't always play nicely
together.  Tarek and the distutils-sig's work is trying to make the world a
better place by bridging this gap better, and there is code out there that
makes it easier to say import a Python package from the Cheeseshop and
.deb-ify it for use on Debian and Ubuntu.

There's also work being done in Launchpad that will allow you to
"build-from-branch" so that in a sense you could let a build farm take your
Bazaar branches and automatically build the packages from them.

I've strayed off-topic I suppose, but I see SCMs and package managers as
complementary technologies that help with important parts of the process of
delivering software to end-users, but I don't quite see how one can make the
other obsolete.

-Barry
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