[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I suppose if you're saying that "pip install lxml" should download and
> install for me Visual Studio, libxml2 sources and any dependencies,
> and run all the builds, then you're right. But I assume you're not. So
> why should I need to install Visual Studio just to *use* lxml?
>
> On the other hand, I concede that there are some grey areas between
> the 2 extremes. I don't know enough to do a proper review of the
> various cases. But I do think that there's a risk that the discussion,
> because it is necessarily driven by developers, forgets that "end
> users" really don't have some tools that a developer would consider
> "trivial" to have.

Binary installers are important: if you think lxml is hard on windows,
think about what it means to build fortran libraries and link them
with visual studio for scipy :) That's one of the reason virtualenv +
pip is not that useful for numpy/scipy end users. Bento has code to
build basic binary installers in all the formats supported by
distutils except for RPM, and the code is by design mostly independ of
the rest. I would be happy to clean up that code to make it more
reusable (most of it is extracted from distutils/setuptools anyway).

But it should be completely orthogonal to the issue of package
description: if there is one thing that distutils got horribly wrong,
that's tying everything altogether. The uncoupling is the key, because
otherwise, one keep discussing all the issues together, which is part
of what makes the discussion so hard. Different people have different
needs.

David