Python needs a CPyAN

[Ian Bicking]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> Peter Hickman <peter at semantico.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Ville Vainio wrote:
>>
>>>I think you are overselling CPAN a little bit here. It is not an
>>>absolute requirement, and I think Python can easily surpass Perl in
>>>popularity even without CPAN functionality. Perl popularity in general
>>>seems to be going down, and I don't think Perl is something to worry
>>>about anymore. Hell, people rarely even mention Perl these days
>>>anyway.
>>
>>Just today we required a module that was not installed on our system.
>>
>>sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Data::Pager'
> 
> 
> With PyPI and distutils, we've got 90% of that already. PyPI needs to
> grow a link to the tarball, and a way to turn a package name into that
> link. Then you need a tool bundled with Python that gets the link from
> PyPI, downloads the package, and runs "python setup.py install".

I might imagine:

   python -m distutils pypi:apackage install

pypi has a download link, but it can be zipped or a tarball, and 
sometimes neither, and it's not really required.  And SourceForge has 
its lame balancing system no matter what we do.  But zip and tar can 
both be handled, and SF just requires a custom link scraper.  The rest 
is a matter of getting people to use PyPI, and put in accurate download 
links.  And use trully unique names.  And some other things I haven't 
thought of.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org