* separated values

[Cliff Wells]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 12:46:55 -0600
Skip Montanaro wrote:

> 
>     >> Of course I want! But even more I want to make the distribution
>     >> slimmer, and allow people to download and install huge number of
>     >> additional modules.
> 
>     Cliff> It might make more sense to break the library up into related
>     Cliff> chunks:  
>     ...
>     Cliff> Then have all of these available at the same location to make
>     Cliff> finding and downloading easier....
> 
> Cliff,
> 
> You obviously need to hang out on help at python.org for awhile. ;-) 

Is this some sort of euphemism?  Sort of like "You need more training"
really means "You don't know what the **** you're doing"? ;-)

Many
> questions come from people who can't even find the current Windows
> installer, or if they do, can't figure out what to do with it.  They are
> going to me miserable if they have to download and install multiple
> mini-distributions.

Believe me, I'm unhappily aware of the level of knowledge of the common
Windows user.  Still, aren't these people aspiring programmers?  Shouldn't
they have just a /bit/ more tenacity?  Sigh...

> The only way this would come close to working is if you had proper
> dependency checks in the mini-distributions (ciphon?): everything depends
on

I mentioned this.  I didn't say it would be easy. ;-)

> the base, image processing probably depends on GUI (PIL likes Tkinter),

Not necessarily.  Much image processing is done batch style, with no GUI.

> communications depends on text processing (XML is used for XML-RPC), etc.
 I

If they are doing XML-RPC or SOAP, they're hopefully smart enough to figure
that out.

> suspect that when all is said and done, the amount of "stuff" the user
has
> to download and install to get up and running will be nearly as large as
> what they download now, and in the process the effort required to install
> what they need will have gone up substantially.

Then again, there could still be a single, full-blown, kitchen-sink archive
for those who don't care and just want everything (myself included).  My
feeling is that, at this moment, it is very difficult to create a
mini-distribution (because of all the interdependencies), whereas it would
be trivial to build a kitchen-sink distribution from the separate
libraries.  Clearly it would require a lot of work up front to separate the
current library into components, but it would be worth it in the long run.

Regards,
Cliff

-- 
Cliff Wells
Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308
(800) 735-0555 x308