[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib? (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Feb 15 02:00:21 CET 2006

Joe Smith wrote:

Windows and RPM are known for major dependency problems, letting packages damage each other, having packages that do not uninstall cleanly (i.e. packages that leave junk all over the place) and generally messing the sytem up quite baddly over time, so that the OS is usually removed and re-installed periodically.)

I'm disappointed that the various Linux distributions still don't seem to have caught onto the very simple idea of not scattering files all over the place when installing something.

MacOSX seems to be the only system so far that has got this right -- organising the system so that everything related to a given application or library can be kept under a single directory, clearly labelled with a version number.

I haven't looked closely into eggs yet, but if they allow Python packages to be managed this way, and do it cross- platform, that's a very good reason to prefer using eggs over a platform-specific package format.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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