On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:27 PM, René Dudfield <ren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Buildout is what a lot of the python community are using now. I would like to note that buildout is a solution to a problem that I don't care to solve. This issue is particularly difficult to explain to people accustomed with buildout in my experience - I have not found a way to explain it very well yet. Buildout, virtualenv all work by sandboxing from the system python: each of them do not see each other, which may be useful for development, but as a deployment solution to the casual user who may not be familiar with python, it is useless. A scientist who installs numpy, scipy, etc... to try things out want to have everything available in one python interpreter, and does not want to jump to different virtualenvs and whatnot to try different packages. This has strong consequences on how you look at things from a packaging POV: - uninstall is crucial - a package bringing down python is a big no no (this happens way too often when you install things through setuptools) - if something fails, the recovery should be trivial - the person doing the installation may not know much about python - you cannot use sandboxing as a replacement for backward compatibility (that's why I don't care much about all the discussion about versioning - I don't think it is very useful as long as python itself does not support it natively). In the context of ruby, this article makes a similar point: http://www.madstop.com/ruby/ruby_has_a_distribution_problem.html David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
