[Python-Dev] PEP 365 (was Re: PEP: per user site-packages directory) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Mon Jan 21 16:23:54 CET 2008

At 01:06 AM 1/22/2008 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Steve Holden wrote: > Christian Heimes wrote: >> Steve Holden wrote: >>> Maybe once we get easyinstall as a part of the core (so there's no need >>> to find and run ezsetup.py to start with) things will start to improve. >>> This is an issue the whole developer community needs to take seriously >>> if we are interested in increasing take-up. >> setuptools and easyinstall won't be included in Python 2.6 and 3.0: >> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0365/ >> > Yes, and yet another release (two releases) will go out without easy > access to the functionality in Pypi. PEP 365 is a good start, but Pypi > loses much of its point until new Python users get access to it "out of > the box". I also appreciate that resource limitations are standing in > the way of setuptools' inclusion (is there something I can do about > that?) Just to hammer the point home, however ...

Have another look at the rationale given in PEP 365 - it isn't the resourcing to do the work that's a problem, but the relatively slow release cycle of the core. By including pkgresources in the core (with the addition of access to pure Python modules and packages on PyPI), we would get a simple, stable base for Python packaging to work from, and put users a single standard command away from the more advanced (but also more volatile) features of easyinstall and friends.

By the way, if we're actually going to get that into 2.6, it would be good for the PEP to actually be approved before then. :)

With respect to Steve's comments about out-of-the-box usability, it should be noted that when you bootstrap a package with pkg_resources, it should be possible to include other command-line arguments after the package specifier. So for example:

 python -m pkg_resources setuptools SomePackage==1.2

would download and install setuptools, and run its "bootstrap script" with "SomePackage==1.2" as a command-line argument. And setuptools' bootstrap script is basically easy_install with some extra code to make sure the setuptools egg gets installed too.

In other words, with PEP 365 in place, "python -m pkg_resources setuptools" is basically a way to say "easy_install" without needing setuptools installed.

(Heck, if what you really want is to have easy_install support in 2.6, we could just as easily bundle an easy_install.py that asks for an install of setuptools if it's not already present.)

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