On Jul 10, 2009, at 1:21 AM, David Cournapeau wrote:
I think it is important that people who come from different
communities
participate to this: people who work on web development have problems
which are mostly orthogonal to mine, but I get the impression that
most
people on distutils-sig fall in this category.
I don't think this perspective is reflective so much of web
development as of application development. Those of us who work on
web applications need to provide working applications, often with hard
scalability and reliability requirements. We need to have control
over how our applications are assembled so we can test known
configurations and deploy them in a repeatable way. I think this would
apply equally well to other sorts of applications.
Other folks are focussed on making libraries available to a large
audience of developers and sometimes even end users. For example, I
guess that numpy and a lot of related tools are often or usually used
in ad hoc one-off scripts for analysis of data. Here flexibility is
king. System Python installations tend to serve these needs fairly
well, especially if certain packages are tricky to install. I often
use matplotlib to do data analysis. For this, using my ubuntu system
Python's install works pretty well. (This is partly because
matplotlib is hard to install using normal egg mechanisms due to some
sniffing it does.)
I agree that distutils is a mess and with your desire to separate
concerns so that people can make progress in different areas without
stepping on each other.
Jim
--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation
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