At 01:44 PM 9/1/2006 -0700, Philippe Bossut wrote:
We could in the meantime provide the eggs for download off a Wiki looking
pages as we do for snapshot builds so, for those who want them, they're
not impossible to find in a user digestible form.
Just as an FYI, running "setup.py register bdist_egg upload" in a project
directory will register the project with the Python Cheeseshop and upload
an egg. There is a "long_description" field that can be set in the setup
script, and this is uploaded to the project's cheeseshop page. For
example, see setuptools' Cheeseshop page:
http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/setuptools
Text that's put in the long description field can be formatted using rST
format ("reStructured Text"), and thus makes a nice page. Registering a
new version of a package like this also results in it being announced to
the Python community via various RSS feeds and aggregators.
So, from the perspective of promoting plugin projects to at least the
Python community, this is a very low-effort way to get the distribution
done, and we don't even have to serve the eggs ourselves. The Cheeseshop
site even displays download statistics for the eggs, so we can get an idea
of their popularity.
The "easy_install" tool automatically scans the Cheeseshop site as well, so
if we include it (or a simple wrapper for it in the UI), users can use it
to download and install plugins. The amount of effort would be determined
by how much user experience quality we want to provide, since the basic
functionality already exists to just run "easy_install
Chandler-FeedsPlugin" from the command-line, causing the plugin to be
recognized the next time Chandler starts up again. We could do anything
from leaving it a command-line operation, all the way up to providing menu
options and dialogs and an automatic restart, perhaps with the ability to
roll back or uninstall a plugin.
On a related note, the Enthought folks have been building a GUI wrapper for
easy_install called "Enstaller", to go with their Envisage IDE product. It
is open source Python code, but unfortunately it looks as if may be
Windows-only at the moment. However, it might offer some inspiration for
plugin management. I have not used or even *seen* it, though, so this
shouldn't be taken to mean that I endorse its UI. :) I'm just noting that
it exists as a possible source for stealing good ideas. (Also, it may not
actually be limited to Windows; I recently received an emailed question
from one of its developers that had to do with LD_LIBRARY_PATH issues on
Linux, so they may be working on versions for other platforms.)
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