[Python-Dev] Package Management - thoughts from the peanut gallery (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Fri Apr 3 15:36:49 CEST 2009

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Olemis Lang <olemis at gmail.com> wrote:

BTW ... I see nothing about removing dist* commands from distutils ... Q: Am I wrong or it seems they will remain in stdlib ?

Ok, beware that what I am writing here is for the long term. There are no plans yet to remove things right now. Maybe some things for 3.1, as long as it is clearly defined and non-controversial. And this is not the most urgent thing to take care of.

So, Some commands are not really used by the OS packagers, whether because these commands don't provide what packagers need, whether because they are unable to let the packagers configure them the way they would like to.

Packagers still need to tell us why and how to make things better. Some people like Toshio or Matthias are already helping a lot on this. We are making a lot of progress since the summit to share our point of views.

So I'd put this task under "creation of a network of OS packager people" (them+others)

And in detail :

1/ define with them the precise usage of Distutils commands in each OS community

2/ define if there's a leading project that could take care of building OS-dependant    packages, using packages built by/with Distutils

4/ see what needs to be done in Distutils to let these projects play with Python packages whithout pain.

5/ finally, see what could be externalized/removed from Distutils in favor of these third-party projects.

This is roughly what Guido was talking about when he said we would remove things like bdist_rpm from the stdlib : it's too OS-specific for the stdlib to do a good job in this area.

To discuss this plan in details, let's move to Distutils-SIG

Cheers Tarek

-- Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/

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