[Python-Dev] setuptools: past, present, future (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sat Apr 22 22:07:55 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Leaving aside the Perl vs. Py thing, opinions on CPAN seem to be diverse -- yes, I've heard people say that this is something that Python sorely lacks; but I've also heard from more than one person that CPAN sucks from a quality perspective. So I think we shouldn't focus on emulating CPAN; rather, we should solve the problems we actually have. I note that CPAN originated in an age before the web was mature.

My personal problems with CPAN were always of the kind that it recorded too many/too stringent dependencies.

I used it over a period of several years on Solaris, roughly two times a year.

Each time, the package I wanted to installed depended on another package, this in turn on a third, and some of these eventually on a Perl version more recent than the one I had installed.

So CPAN would always first install a new version of Perl for me. Sometimes, this would fail, because Perl wouldn't pass its test suite on Solaris. So I did huge downloads, long compilation times, and still didn't get the package installed.

I always fixed it by installing the new Perl version manually, and then starting over with CPAN again.

I'm not exactly sure why that happened, but I think there are two causes:

Regards, Martin

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