Python in Linux - barrier to Python 3.x

[Diez B. Roggisch]

David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> writes:

>>
>> I don't deny them their experience. Do you deny the experience of other
>> people with *other* needs? As I already said: I don't propose to ditch
>> the package management. I'm all fine with a distro that carefully
>> selects it's packages and dependencies.
>
> In your previous email, you were "suggesting" that we should make
> people use a specific set of python-specific tools. That does not
> sound very consistent with the idea of letting people choose what they
> want to use.
>
> FWIW, I think those tools are already pushed too aggressively,
> confusing many people who use pip, virtualenv, etc... for dubious
> reasons ("I read somewhere that I should use this"), and causing
> numerous bug reports on the numpy/scipy mailing lists.

What I suggested was that there is a python-centric solution for
managing dependencies for users of Linux, Windows and OSX alike. And
which offers recent versions of python to anybody. A lot of wishful
thinking, admittedly. But less than trying to deal with *all* the
diffences in code, style and politics of various distributions.

I was not suggesting that this solution itself be manifold. The sad
truth is that there currently seem to be various attempts to improve or
even fix perceived or real shortcomings of of distutils or probably even
more setuptools, and this is from an outside perspective a waste. But
then, the survival of the fittest, so to speak, requires the death of
some that are unfit. It's hard to say which approach will "win". So we
seem to be stuck with that at least for a while.

zc.buildout, btw, seems to be going into the general direction of doing
a lot (if not everything) itself. Including complete 3rd-party-packages 
and their builds.

 http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.buildout#buildout-examples

For historic reasons I personally haven't used it yet. But it seems to
scratch an itch, don't you think?

Regarding the "dubiousness" of these reasons - I'm happy if you don't
feel the pain. Good for you. I do, and frankly virtualenv is a
life-saver for me in many situations. I wish it was part of core python,
to create isolated environments. It sure is better than the Java-way of
relying on environment-variables or giant sized commandline argument
lists to specify specific version sets.

However, *both* solutions cater to the obvious need of something other
than pre-packaged versions in the distro. Is that such an abnorm wish?
Amazing. 

Diez