On May 1, 2008, at 2:51 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm not on distutils-sig, but this is probably of little interest
to python-dev. Please Cc: me if you think my continued input would
be useful to this discussion.
I use distutils (or setuptools) plus GNU stow to solve the following
subset of your complaints:
The #1 reason:
* distutils does not provide an uninstaller.
...
* distutils will interfere with the system package manager,
potentially breaking it, by writing files to locations reserved for
the system package manager (/usr, et. al.)
* distutils won't uninstall a system-installed version of the
package first, so if you use e.g. --force to overwrite your system
files, you may end up with leftover system packaged (incompatible,
earlier-version) plugins or modules which break your distutils install
* running arbitrary, non-vendor-supported code as root as a matter
of habit is, in my humble opinion, bad; distutils requires you to
run as root for the default behavior to work. the system package
manager typically requires root permission too, but at least it's
the sort of thing which has been audited.
* not only can you not reverse the process, there's no way to
*tell* if distutils has crapped all over your system installation
of a particular package
GNU stow + distutils or setuptools solves all of the above for me.
It does not solve the following:
* setuptools causes seemingly random breakages (in packages which
support it), and I don't want to deal with bug reports from users
related to packaging; packagers are capable of dealing with
setuptools' interactions with the platform and creating a nice,
neat bundle that works as expected.
* when you say "distutils", what do you mean? running 'setup.py'
from some random revision of trunk? doing 'sdist' from trunk, then
install? Using operating-system packages at least suggests that
you're using a release, or if not an actual release, you've gone
through something approximating the actual release/build process
that we suggest for users.
* if the user is installing for development anyway, and not for
deployment, then why bother doing any installation step at all?
It's probably better to just drop an SVN checkout on PYTHONPATH
somewhere.
And, finally...
* why bother having installers prepared for particular systems, if
they are not the preferred way of doing things? If and when
distutils is ready to be the thing I will suggest to users, I
imagine that we'll stop having operating system packages. (Of
course, that begs the question why distutils would have commands
like "bdist_wininst" - it's difficult to beat the native packages
for convenience.)
Why indeed? I personally prefer to distribute my code in the form
of source .tar.gz's which are to be installed either with
easy_install or by untarring them and running "setup.py", and I
prefer to re-use code from other people in that same format.
Regards,
Zooko
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