[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Chris McDonough chrism at plope.com
Thu Jun 21 16:59:31 CEST 2012

On 06/21/2012 10:30 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

A tool to generate an OS-specific system package from a Python library project should be unrelated to a Python distribution installer. Instead, you'd use related tools that understood how to unpack the distribution packaging format to build one or more package structures. The resulting structures will be processed and then eventually installed by native OS install tools. But the Python distribution installer (e.g easyinstall, pip, or some future similar tool) would just never come into play to create those structures. The Python distribution installer and the OS-specific build tool might share code to introspect and unpack files from the packaging format, but they'd otherwise have nothing to do with one another.

This seems like the most reasonable separation of concerns to me anyway, and I'd be willing to work on the code that would be shared by both the Python-level installer and by OS-level packaging tools. Right, but if the standard library grows a dist installer (and I think it eventually should), we're going to need to define how it should behave when executed with the system Python. That will give at least 3 mechanisms for Python code to get onto a system: 1. Python dist -> converter -> system package -> system Python path 2. Python dist -> system Python installer -> system Python path 3. Python dist -> venv Python installer -> venv Python path While I agree that path 2 should be discouraged for production systems, I don't think it should be prevented altogether (since it can be very convenient on personal systems).

I'm not sure under what circumstance 2 and 3 wouldn't do the same thing. Do you have a concrete idea?

As far as the scope of the packaging utilities and what they can install goes, I think the distutils2 folks have done a pretty good job of defining that with their static metadata format: http://alexis.notmyidea.org/distutils2/setupcfg.html#files

Yeah definitely a good start.

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