CPAN functionality for python - requirements

[Bruce Sass]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:45:38PM -0500, Doug Hellmann wrote:
<...>
> >I sense a consensus that the "install" part should be handled by distutils.  Is
> >that right?
>
> That seems to be where we diverge...  If somone has made an RPM of it, I'd
> rather have that than some files winding up hanging around my file-system.

Even if the RPM was made by someone who didn't have a clue?
Wouldn't it be better to have a standard way to convert a Python
package into an RPM, that way any packaging problems will be seen by
everyone and the fix will be fast.

> >3. Need to include documentation along with source for packages.
>
> Not gonna happen...  Until there's tools and standards for such documentation,
> it's not really possible to deal with them...  In the cases where docstrings
> are used, installing the module produces the documentation, but that seems
> to be the exception...

Huh, there are tools and standards.
Isn't /usr/shar/doc/package the FHS place for general package specific
docs, and before that it was /usr/doc/package (FSSTND), MS users just put
them into the installation dir.  Special formats usually have a place
to reside, but I wouldn't expect an archive network or its tools to
know or care what and where they are.

> CPAN is a Unix-like directory structure, files are downloaded as .tar bundles
> which are extracted and a "perl Makefile.pl; make; make test; make install"
> is run.  Does Pippy have "make"?

The above is what Debian appears to have replaced - *ifiact*, because
it was not versatile enough, it thinks it knows how things should be
done and is wrong.


- Bruce