[Python-Dev] Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB) (original) (raw)

Jan Claeys lists at janc.be
Sat Dec 2 17:07:18 CET 2006

Op vrijdag 01-12-2006 om 00:16 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Steve Holden:

Jan Claeys wrote: [...] > Probably the Debian maintainers could have named packages differently to > make things less confusing for newbies (e.g. by having the 'pythonX.Y' > packages being meta-packages that depend on all binary packages built > from the upstream source package), but that doesn't mean splitting > "python" (or other projects) up in several packages is wrong. E.g. when > installing on an flash drive, people are probably quite happy to leave > the 20 MiB of Python documentation out... > Right, who cares about newbies, they're only the future of the language, after all. I take your point that some flexibility is advantageous once you get past the newbie stage, but I think that here we are talking about trying to avoid mis-steps that will potentially put people off making that transition.

Like I said, it's possible to split Python without making things complicated for newbies. The fact that Debian didn't do so in the past might be a considered a packaging bug, but the problem isn't in the practice of splitting upstream projects in several binary packages itself.

> Maybe python.org can include several logical "divisions" in the > python.org distribution and make it easy for OS distro packagers to make > separate packages if they want to, as most of them are quite happy to > have less work to do, provided the upstream "divisions" do more or less > what they want. ;-) (Oh, and such a division should IMHO also include > a "minimal python" for embedded/low-resource hardware use, where things > like distutils, GUI toolkits, a colelction of 20 XML libraries and > documentation are most likely not needed.)

If only there were some guarantee that the distros would respect any project partitioning imposed by python-deb we might stand a chance of resolving these issues.

There will never be a guarantee, as some distros might have very special targets, but I'm pretty sure that most distros would follow any sensible proposition (and looking at current practice might give a good clue about what they want).

-- Jan Claeys

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