On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Nimret Sandhu <[email protected]> wrote:
> what's the story with python's package management these days? easy_install,
> setuptools, etc .. what are they and how are they supposed to be used? If devs
> can't figure this morass out, how are users supposed to?
It's still Setuptools or Distribute plus Pip.
Longer term I think Distutils2 will be the solution. Tarek Ziade has
put a lot of work into consolidating the packaging mechanisms and
porting it to the standard library, and Guido has finally acknowledged
that such a thing is necessary. Distutils2 will be in the Python 3
core. In Python 2 you'll have to install it, which raises the same
bootstrapping problem we have now. It's looking doubtful there will be
a Python 2.8, so no chance to put it in there.
On Ubuntu 10.10 I install 'python-setuptools', 'python-virtualenv',
and 'virtualenvwrapper'. These are finally advanced enough that the
Ubuntu packages seem to work with recent libraries.
('python-setuptools' is really Distribute.)
I wish Guido had recognized this as a central problem in Python eight
years ago when people were just starting to ship packages with
Setuptools dependencies, but he didn't because he never used that
new-fangled easy_install. So it took several years for the core
developers to acknowledge the problem, and now several years to build
a solution.
--
Mike Orr <[email protected]>
