[Pythonmac-SIG] Why Do I Explicitly Need MacPython

[Bob Ippolito]

On 10/3/06, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen at laposte.net> wrote:
> On Oct 2, 2006, at 21:24, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
> > Using easy_install is quite easy -- you type "easy_install
> > WhatYouNeed" and press return. That's it. Users currently need some
> > familiarity with Terminal in order to get anything done with Python
> > anyway.
>
> Not necessarily. I know one person who uses nothing but IDLE and is
> quite scared of the command line.
>
> On Oct 2, 2006, at 23:12, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
> > Well it's possible to create an association with .egg files to open up
> > a terminal and run easy_install, but that's kinda pointless because
> > nobody downloads eggs manually.
>
> I know lots of users who would prefer to download packages and then
> install them, rather than do everything on one step. There are
> various reasons for this:
>
> - You can decide to download only from trustworthy places, or install
> only packages handed to you by a trustworthy person.
>
> - You can archive the packages you download, so you always know
> exactly what you installed and you can always reproduce an
> installation at a later time.
>
> - You can install on a machine without an internet connection
> (laptops on the road, high-security sites, cluster nodes, ...)
>
> - If you are behind a strict firewall, you can download using your
> preconfigured browser and don't have to configure proxies for
> additional tools.
>
>
> Therefore, if it is possible to download and install eggs manually,
> then I am sure there would be a client base for a GUI-based installer
> associated with .egg files.

It's still very atypical. You'd be coding a GUI client that three people use.

There are options with easy_install to do all of these things. I'm
pretty sure there's an option to download packages without installing
them that people use to download the eggs (e.g. for transfer to
another machine or archival), and there's an option to use a
filesystem path instead of the internet for installing packages.

> That said, I have to add that I am not a big fan of setuptools. Last
> time I checked, they didn't handle installation of C header files in
> a useful way. Since most of my packages include C header files and
> depend on other packages' C header files, setuptools are of little
> use for me.

Any other problems you have you should report to distutils-sig so that
they get fixed. It's definitely not going to get any less popular, so
you're going to have to live with setuptools.

-bob