[Pythonmac-SIG] PackMan issues

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi Tom,

You might want to take a look at wxPackageManager. While working on the 
Windows 'version', I had to get around the fact that "curl", which PM 
uses to download packages, wasn't available - so I wrote a pure Python 
solution using urllib. Since the downloading code is in Python, I could 
then set up a little progress dialog to update the status and a cancel 
button to stop the operation. It doesn't tell the size before hitting 
install, but the progress dialog will say "x of y bytes downloaded" so 
if y is huge you can just click cancel. You can download it from:

http://www.theolliviers.com/python/wxpm/

There are a few other nice features added in as well, which I list on 
the web site. BTW, it includes the wxPython extension libs, so it 
should work even if you don't have wxPython installed. (I say should 
because my I don't have a spare Mac without wxPython to test with.) It 
is still very new, but it uses PIMP as the backend so most of the code 
re-write is the GUI itself. The Windows version still needs work, again 
because of lack of the "unzip" command line tool, but as you can see in 
the screenshot, I've installed many of the Mac packages successfully 
with it. ;-)

If you do use it, please let me know how it goes!

Thanks,

Kevin

On Oct 30, 2003, at 2:42 PM, Tom Loredo wrote:

>
> Hi folks-
>
> I love the package manager, but would like to raise the following
> issues (possible bug; feature requests):
>
> When I try to use PM at Bob I's pimp site, the list of packages is
> larger than the window.  I can scroll down to see the bottom part of
> the list, but as soon as I release the scrollbar it immediately scrolls
> back up to the top of the list.  Thus many of his packages are
> inaccessible.  This is using MacPy2.3 on OS 10.2.6 on a G4 Quicksilver
> and on a G3 Powerbook.
>
> My G4 is at home with a dialup connection; my G3 I can bring to
> work with T3 access.  Having one machine with a slow net connection
> is behind the following requests.
>
> First, I'd love to see package size information in the PM window.
> This way I can tell if it's realistic to download a package to
> my G4 over my dialup connection.
>
> Second, I'd love to see useful progress info on the download and
> installation.  If I check "verbose," PM tries to produce this,
> but unfortuately the resulting text window update is too slow and
> I'll typically not see *any* of the progress lines until the
> download is complete, at which point the window happily shows
> me every status line from the start to 100%.
>
> Finally, I'd love for there to be a way to save a package locally
> in a way allowing it to be moved to another machine and installed
> via PM there.  Perhaps I can just sync the site-packages
> directories on both machines, but I don't know if some of the
> packages have other side effects.  Is this feasible?  Ideally
> I'd like to grab the packages on my G3 at work, and install them
> on my G4 at home.  I suppose I could do it directly with distutils,
> but it would be neat if PM could do this.
>
> Thanks,
> Tom Loredo
>
>
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