> On 8/25/07, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I believe the only reasonable solution is to promote the use of > package managers, and to let go of the "batteries included" philosophy
It's important to realize that most operating systems (Windows, OS X) don't really support the use of package managers. Installers, yes; package managers, no. And installers don't do dependencies. And most users (and probably most developers) are running one of these package-manager-less systems. Even with package managers, installing an external extension is out of bounds for most users. Many work for companies where the IT department controls what can and can't be installed, and the IT department does the installs. I do this myself, out of sheer lazyness -- I don't want to understand the system of dependencies for each Linux variant and I don't want to work as a sysop, so when I need some package on some Fedora box that isn't there, I don't fire up "yum"; instead, I call our internal tech support to make it happen. This means a turn-around time that varies from an hour to several days. This can be a killer if you just want to try something out -- the energy barrier is too high. So as soon as you require an install of something, you lose 80% of your potential users. Though I agree with some of your other points, those about the fast-moving unstable frameworks, and about the packages that depend on an external non-Python non-standard resource. Aside from that, though, I believe "batteries included" is really effective. I'd like to see more API-based work, like the DB-API work, and the WSGI work, both of which have been very effective. I'd like to see something like PyGUI added as a standard UI API, with a default binding for each platform (GTK+ for Windows and Linux, Cocoa for OS X, Swing for Jython, HTML5 for Web apps, perhaps a Tk binding for legacy systems, etc.) I think a standard image-processing API, perhaps based on PIL, would be another interesting project. Bill _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
