David Lyon wrote: > Your whole email whilst perphaps technically correct is terribly > difficult for a software engineering person to follow.
It made perfect sense to me. The words "eggs" brings with it a whole lot more baggage than just the sum of the technical parts in the language core that support them (primarily distutils and zipimport). I find it unfortunate that the name for the distutils metadata format contains the word "egg" because it implies much greater consensus around the philosophy behind eggs than actually exists. A lot of the baggage associated with the "eggs" concept is related to the inherent conflict between different approaches to dependency management: 1. Use the system package management system for everything (preferred by many, perhaps even most, *nix sysadmins, but not an option on Windows) 2. Create a Python specific package management system independent of the system package manager (an area dominated by setuptools, including both eggs and non-zipped package distributions) 3. Bundle everything into a monolithic application or framework (the typical approach on Windows with py2exe, but also the philosophy behind tools like virtualenv) All 3 of those philosophies have good arguments in their favour and they all have good arguments against them as well. Your comments about your package management system suggest that it is just yet another entrant in category 2 and you have said nothing to allay the concerns of those that despise that philosophy with a passion because of the problems it causes them when trying to manage their systems using the first philosophy. Since the Python constituency includes developers and system administrators that favour all 3 philosophies (and probably other variants that I haven't thought to describe), anything that makes it into the standard library will need to adequately balance the interests of all parties (e.g. as has occurred in the PEP 376 metadata enhancement discussions). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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
