Jim Fulton wrote: > > 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.
>From what I read on this ML and elsewhere, it seems that there is a key difference between 'webapp' and conventional applications deployment. For webapp, the developer and the one who install is often the same person, or at least a person with the same 'culture'. Normal applications are targeted at end users and that makes for a lot of difference. On the end user side, .pth, eggs, sys.path hacks are a never-ending source of troubles. For this reasons I am very skeptical about things which encourage to install multiple, 'system-wide', packages, because it does not go into the right direction for the end-user IMO. Not in the current state of python and its import system, at least. Controlling how the application is assembled, in which configuration is important - but it should not have consequences on other packages. If an application needs a very precise version of a given library, when deployed, this library should not be visible to other packages IMHO. It would make a lot of issues easier: uninstall support, 'queryable' system, etc... would stay tractable. Because with the current situation with eggs, sys.path hacks and co, I don't see how it is possible to have a reliable system which support uninstall and rollback. That's already a difficult enough problem as it is. Flexibility at this level is an anti-goal. > > 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. Yes, but it is also used as a basis for applications as well. One of the thing I would really like to see is something ala cran (related to the statistical software R), where people could, inside a numpy/scipy environment, ask for a list of packages according to a list of keywords, install them and uninstall them reliably. Without the need to be an admin on their machine. From this perspective, I think there are a lot of common goals with people who use easy_install and co. But at least I am not satisfied with the current implementations and their lack of robustness. cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
