My $0.02, coming from packaging many things:
People who develop a particular package are very used to how it is
built, and so more or less however that works is fine for them.
People that are coming to something new, or packaging systems that
have say 20K packages, would like to see a small number of common
build systems, and for any package that can reasonably fit into an
existing approach to use that approach.
Users generally would like to "apt install" or "pkg_add" something,
and be unaware of all of this. This means that a one-off install
process has to be accomodated in each packaging system.
So therefore I would like to be able to have weewx behave like most
other things and invoke it with the usual prefix arg for where I want
it, and have everything be in a many-things-in-one-prefix normal
place.
My impression is that pip is basically a packaging system (that only
works for python) that expects the setuptools interface. So making
things work nicely with setuptools for various packaging systems and
making it work for pip is probably more or less the same thing.
My observations of weewx are that
1) what it is needing to do is fundamentally not odd. A bunch of
python libs, some programs that need those libs (bin), some config
files (etc) some place to write data (var), docs, and so on.
2) It seems that 99.5+ % of python stuff using some sort of
distutils/setuptools. I am not entirely clear on the details any
more, but I did figure it out to spiff up pkgsrc support for this and
the fine points have left my head. I don't see any reason that using
the standard approach wouldn't work for everything except updating the
config file
3) config files are awkward, partially because there are often
packaging systems in the middle. It seems best to have the
installation and the config merging script be separate. packages can
hook the merging script for package install time if that makes sense,
but the package build will do an "install" operation to a destdir
before tarring it up.
4) The current weewx build basically demands its own prefix. I would
expect to see libs in the usual place and scripts in ${PREFIX}/bin.
That means config in ${PREFIX}/etc/weexx/, and various other things in
the right compartmentalized names for many things in a PREFIX. I
raised this earlier and my understanding is that various Linux
distribution packages adjust the standard build. But this seems
suboptimal; there's no problem with a standard layout even if one has
only weewx in a prefix
Of course, there is the question of "Ideally how would this be if we
were starting from scratch" and then the questions of "how hard is it to
get from here to there" and "is it worth it".
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