Wheel-reinvention with Python

[Paul Rubin]

Torsten Bronger <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
> > No it's not on Fedora, at least FC3.
> 
> It may not be on a DVD but the RPMs are avaiable where Fedora should
> look for them.
> 
> > I had huge trouble trying to build it and gave up.
> 
> It's perfectly okay if you are used to build everything yourself but
> this is a quite untypical approach.

I think my approach is in some sense completely typical: I don't want
to install ANYTHING, EVER.  I've described this before.  I want to buy
a new computer and have all the software I'll ever need already on the
hard drive, and use it from that day forward.  By the time the
software is obsolete and I want new stuff, the hardware is also
obsolete, so I buy another new computer and start over.  This is the
way most non-technical use their computers (Wintel boxes with MS
Office pre-installed), but then I don't get Python or much other
development stuff

Buying a Macintosh would maybe accomplish the above for me better than
wintel (i.e. it comes with dev stuff including Python), but somewhat
less typically, I also want access to all the source code, so I run
Linux on an x86 box.  That means I approximate my zero-install desire
by starting with an empty hard drive and plopping in the FC3 (or now
FC4) DVD and clicking "install everything" just once at setup time.
After that, if I absolutely have to install anything, I consider it an
exceptional situation and so I want to compile from source, not unpack
a binary.