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

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Jun 22 15:24:19 CEST 2012

On 22 June 2012 13:39, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

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.

I suppose if you're saying that "pip install lxml" should download and install for me Visual Studio, libxml2 sources and any dependencies, and run all the builds, then you're right. But I assume you're not. So why should I need to install Visual Studio just to use lxml?

On the other hand, I concede that there are some grey areas between the 2 extremes. I don't know enough to do a proper review of the various cases. But I do think that there's a risk that the discussion, because it is necessarily driven by developers, forgets that "end users" really don't have some tools that a developer would consider "trivial" to have.

Paul.

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