[Pythonmac-SIG] Package Manager idea, adding a URL scheme

[Bob Ippolito]

On Friday, Oct 3, 2003, at 13:44 America/New_York, Just van Rossum  
wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> I think Jack is thinking too much about source package installs,
>> while you and I are focused on binary package installs?  The binary
>> ones are the real win of PackMan, and the source package installs
>> would be icing on the cake, mostly.
>
> Yes. I'd even go so far as to not support source installs at all...

It makes sense for pure python packages, because then they don't have  
to be packed up per-platform (not that it takes more than a few seconds  
for me to package something with my scripts).

> Who needs source installs? I think it's only people who (for example)
> have their own private extension modules that extend Numeric. That
> should be a _very_ small group of people, and a rather savvy group at
> that: they might as well install Numeric without PackMan.

The extension modules are probably not inside Numeric itself, anyway.   
You're right though, some people like to use exotic compile flags  
and/or non-default libraries.. like Numeric+ATLAS.  The ATLAS I'm using  
in my PackMan repository is the one embedded inside Apple's vecLib,  
because it was easy for me to do and should get the performance that  
the number cruncher's want (though, I may be wrong, I don't have any  
real benchmarks to throw at it).

> Here's an issue that I'm not totally clear about: there are packages
> that need external frameworks, I think wxPython and Tcl/Tk are the main
> examples here. Are these special cases, or does PackMan need to
> _generally_ support installing external libraries? If the latter, what
> kind of consequences does that have for cross-platform support? Is that
> a reasonable goal/requirement at all?

pygame is another case.

For the OS X platform I'm kind of leaning towards just making a  
Frameworks directory inside Python and having the required  
dylibs/frameworks live in there (Tcl/Tk, wxPython, SDL*, libpng,  
libtiff, etc).  This would be excellent for bundle builder!

Basically they would go in here (or the ~/Library equivalent):
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Resources/Python.app/ 
Contents/Frameworks

And would all be linked with dylib ids of  
@executable_path/../Frameworks/whatever

This would be extremely awesome.

-bob