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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Jun 22 14:39:18 CEST 2012

Nick Coghlan writes:

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Paul Moore writes:

 > End users should not need packaging tools on their machines.

I think this desideratum is close to obsolete these days, with webapps in "the cloud" downloading resources (including, but not limited to, code) on an as-needed basis.

There's still a lot more to the software world than what happens on the public internet.

That's taking just one extreme out of context. The other extreme I mentioned is a whole (virtual) Python environment to go with your app.

And I don't really see a middle ground, unless you're delivering a non-standard stdlib anyway, with all the stuff that end users don't need stripped out of it. They'll get the debugger and the profiler with Python; should we excise them from the stdlib just because end users don't need them? How about packaging diagnostic tools, especially in the early days of the new module?

I agreed that end users should not need to download the packaging tools separately or in advance. But that's rather different from having a requirement that the tools not be included, or that installers should have no dependencies on the toolset outside of a minimal and opaque runtime module.

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