2009/4/9 zooko <zo...@zooko.com>: > On Apr 8, 2009, at 4:27 AM, Paul Moore wrote: > >> 1. (Meta-requirement) I want to be able to download a Windows installer[1] >> for *every* package I need. >> 1a. This means that the barrier for packagers building Windows installers >> should be as low as possible. >> 1b. It also means that other formats (e.g. eggs) should offer no benefit >> over Windows installers > > I personally, as a consumer of other people's software, prefer to acquire > their packages as sdist .tar.gz's or as .eggs on all platforms, including > Windows, which I use regularly. So your and my preferences as a consumer of > packages differ on this.
Are you able to explain *why* you prefer this? (I'm not trying to change your mind at all, just trying to get a wider understanding of how people's experiences differ). For me (using Windows only) the benefits of bdist_wininst/bdist_msi are: - Uses the system package manager (limited as it may be) - Means I don't need to have a compiler installed (even though I do on many of my machines) If I have to guess at your reasons, my assumption would be: - Consistent means of installing on all platforms - ??? How far off the mark am I? Written like that, my reasons (obviously, as I'm biased!) look stronger, so I am pretty sure I'm not understanding your situation properly. > Fortunately, as far as the distutils is concerned > "Windows installers" vs. "sdists" vs. "eggs" are not mutually exclusive. > The distutils will provide a standard for metadata so that all of those > distribution formats can have the same metadata, and it will allow > automation such as bdist_msi and sdist_dsc (from stdeb) so that it can > become easier for developers to produce these things. By the way, the exact > same sorts of preference-among-consumers issues arises on the Linux side > (which I also use regularly), where some people mistakenly think that they > want distutils to support eggs worse, when what they really want is for it > to support debs better (which I hope stdeb will ultimately do). The key thing for me would be if it was easy to convert any given binary format for a platform into another. This stems from the fact that compiling extensions is hard on Windows. So being able to convert eggs to and from bdist_wininst or bdist_msi installers would be sufficient. But standard metadata isn't quite enough by itself, as it still requires someone with a compiler and the relevant libraries configured to create the DLLs, etc. Given that all the *files* contained in any given binary distribution are identical (if they aren't that's a different problem!) then creating converters should be possible - although I'm not aware of anyone looking at this. Maybe it's a useful area to spend some effort on? Paul. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
