Am 24.11.2005 um 19:27 schrieb Josselin Mouette:
Le jeudi 24 novembre 2005 à 12:49 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
I don't really care if you accept the proposals or not; you guys
need to do
whatever you think is best for Debian. I've only tried to educate
you
about your options regarding eggs, framed within the assumption
that you
*want* to distribute egg-based projects. The question of eggs'
goodness or
lack thereof is entirely irrelevant within that frame. Either you
want to
distribute those projects or you don't. If you don't, then this
discussion
is pointless. If you do, then arguing that people shouldn't use
eggs is
equally pointless. The only discussion that has any point is
*how* we can
get the needs of both Debian and the project developers met.
Indeed. I'm sure no sane Debian developer would want to distribute
egg-based projects if there was another way to distribute them, but
they
are here and people will want them. You are making things worse by
advocating the egg way of doing things, and the only thing I can do if
you don't stop is to urge developers to think twice before shipping
their projects this way. Maybe it will make their development a bit
more
difficult, but it will improve the situation for their users.
Eggs are not really a way to *ship* Python projects. It is a way to
deploy Python projects so that they can provide discoverable meta-
data at runtime.
This meta-data can be used in many ways. An example: for the latest
release of the Trac project management web-app we implemented a
simple plugin system that is based on Python eggs. It uses the egg
meta-data to discover other Python projects that provide plugins for
itself. Thus, this meta-data is essential for using plugins in Trac,
and if a package is installed without this meta-data, well, you
could've just as well not installed it at all.
Sure, every Python project that wanted to be extensible could just
reinvent the wheel here and implement its own system for discovering
and activating plugins. But Python eggs give us a unified solution to
this problem, and a very nice one, too.
The problems this approach may raise for package maintainers need to
be discussed and addressed. But to simply say that eggs are a
"crappy" technology is just ignorant.
Cheers,
Chris
--
Christopher Lenz
cmlenz at gmx.de
http://www.cmlenz.net/
