James Y Knight wrote: > > On Jul 22, 2009, at 4:49 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > >> Debian has a long history of doing this different, so it's >> not much of a surprise. They also apply such changes to >> Python packages. >> >> However, all of this is non-standard and will cause problems >> with tools that rely on the standard site-packages/ location. Such >> changes should be discouraged. > > And yet, the change seems to have some strong reasoning, solves the > problem discussed in this thread, and was apparently discussed and > approved of by some core python developers before being implemented. It > seems a bit foolish to me to thus just dismiss it as "evil debian being > different"...
Maybe I've misunderstood some important detail, but how will their "change" help with anything other than making their distribution a non-standard Python installation ? distutils allows for a great deal of flexibility. For some reason, this does not appear to be known to a larger audience. I can only recommend reading Greg's great write-up about the end-user perspective of installing Python modules: http://docs.python.org/install/ A little known fact is that distutils can easily be customized using config files: http://docs.python.org/install/#distutils-configuration-files Together with the PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH environment variables setup in your .bashrc, this gives you full flexibility regarding the Python package setup and permits setting up private Python installations, parallel Python installations, Python installations sharing packages, etc. etc. It really depends a lot on what you want to achieve. There's no one fits all configuration. Using a non-standard Python installation as system Python is certainly not a good approach to solving anything. It only makes it harder for users having to fight problems arising out of this. You have the same problem in other areas as well. A prominent example being Microsoft's tendency (in the past) to tweak standards to better meet their requirements. > If anything it seems like it's a failure of the Python project to make > easily deployable software, compounded with a failure of communication > within the python community. I lost you there. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Jul 22 2009) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try our new mxODBC.Connect Python Database Interface for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com