Hi there, On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 8:00 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: >> What's the proportional benefit for those who put stuff in the system? >> How much effort is involved in putting things into the system? How would >> immutability hinder the benefit? > > TO give a specific example: I'm getting tired of people asking for PyXML > support, despite all pages where they could possibly get it from stating > that it's deprecated and unmaintained. At times, I think the best > solution would be to completely delete the software.
An interesting example. I'm not convinced deleting PyXML would stop these people. :) We're talking about proportional benefit here, though. This sounds like a very rare case. It seems that "not wanting to support software" is somehow connected to "not providing the software for download" in people's minds - this is exactly the reason why the maintainer of the package that triggered this discussion for me removed these older versions. And as a result he probably got more support issues than if if he'd left them around. :) You can also see this as a historical record or version control issue. Just because version 0.7 is in a version control system somewhere doesn't mean that the developers are going to support this version. But in this case, I don't see developers argue there that this historical version should therefore be removed. With dependencies, my project in version control (or in released tarball form) has a dependency on an external system. I could instead check all dependencies into my version control system, or I could depend on an external system with more guarantees. That's the feedback I'm getting: either use a system with more guarantees such as a Debian release, or check everything into my own version control system. But this isn't always feasible. * debian might not have my dependencies available yet, or a different version, * I want to hack on the stable and development version of my project without having to install a virtual linux for each to make sure the debian dependencies are right * I want to automate the installation procedure, and therefore can't write an INSTALL.txt which says "apt-get this" * I want have a cross distribution compatible installation instructions Checking stuff into my own version control system has less issues and is indeed workable. There is a paradox there though: I want to release my package to PyPI in a reusable form and therefore can't include all Python dependencies inside it. So I'm not relying on PyPI to download packages myself but I'm asking consumers of my package to do so? Regards, Martijn _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list Catalog-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
