ubuntu dist-packages

[David Lyon]

On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:05:51 -0700 (PDT), Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk>
wrote:
> No, it's the problem of the Pythonic packaging brigade that package
> retrieval, building and installing is combined into one unsatisfactory
> whole. 

Brigade? That implies a disciplined and systematic approach..

I would suggest a better term is just guerrilla fighters.

There's no central planning.. no looking out for the greater good..

No sense of future.. forgive my pessimism.. 

> In fact, the distributions have proven themselves
> to be quite competent at managing huge numbers of software packages in
> a semi-automated fashion, so it's baffling that people doing work on
> Pythonic packaging tools wouldn't want to learn as much as they can
> about how those people manage it.

That's a serious and true allegation. I think the answer is that the
people that are running it aren't interested in cleaning things up
for the linux or windows platform.

Consensus seems to be just "remove" anything that relates to windows
or linux as an approach to harmonising it.

I believe that it should be harmonised.


> For me, when making Debian packages, it has become easier to use the
> debhelper stuff to install things like documentation and resources
> than it is to figure out which special options have to be passed to
> the particular distutils incarnation of the setup function in order to
> get such stuff put in the right place, especially since distutils
> probably still employs an ad-hoc 1990s proprietary UNIX "oh just dump
> that stuff in some directory or other and forget about it" mentality.

It doesn't. Actually, it can't even do that very well.

90's.... which '90s ? 1890's ?

> Really, distutils should be all about *dist*ribution and even then get
> out of the way as much as possible - the hard stuff is extracting the
> appropriate knowledge about the built Python interpreter in order to
> build extensions. 

Exactly.

> Installation should be left to something which has
> an opinion about where things should be placed on a particular system,
> and which has the capability to know how to uninstall stuff - a
> capability which never seems to get any closer in the distutils scene.

(sigh) - it is true...

David