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

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Wed Feb 15 02:24:06 CET 2006

On Feb 14, 2006, at 5:00 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

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.

It should also be mentioned that eggs and platform-specific package
formats are absolutely not mutually exclusive. You could use apt/rpm/ ports/etc. to fetch/build/install eggs too. There are very few
reasons not to use eggs -- in theory anyway, the implementation isn't
finished yet.

The only things that really need to change are the packages like
Twisted, numpy, or SciPy that don't have a distutils-based main
setup.py... Technically, since egg is just a specification, they
could even implement it themselves without the help of setuptools
(though that seems like a bad approach).

-bob

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