On 06 Jan 2005 18:46:00 -0800, Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>"Terry Reedy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Would it be possible, at least for Windows, to write a Python script >> implementing a 'virtual distribution'? IE, download Python, install it, >> download next package, install it, etc. -- prefereably table driven? >I just don't understand why you'd want to do that, instead of putting >all the files in the distro in the first place. Plus there would be maddening dependencies - "oh, in order to use this I need dl that". "oh, that package is missing", "why that doesn't work?" - and time gets wasted. On Linux, quite a lot of code had to be written to resolve dependencies like "a.rpm depends on b.rpm depends on c.rpm ...". Sure, apt is a wonderful tool for resolving such stuff - but I've seen even apt choking sometimes on dependencies it couldn't resolve, esp. when the package you attempt to dl is broken in some way. Reason - apt-get says "sorry, what this package depends on is broken and I can't find anything else in your /etc/apt/sources.list that would be appropriate". Result? Nobody gets to use Pine on this machine, unless I compile it myself (which I finally did). Sure it _can_ be done, but essentially it's a waste of time that this person could devote to doing smth else. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Why get into resolving such complexity if you don't have to? There are good reasons to use tools like apt-get or yum or up2date on Linux: you can't fit the bugfixes on a CD that come every day, obviously, there's too much of it all to fit simply everything anybody could ever need on the media, etc, etc. However, with Python that's not a problem, because distro is smaller and it doesn't change _that_ often, as lots of packages on Linux are updated almost daily. One of the options for Python could be to have two distributions: one standard, basic distribution, and the "Stuffed Python" based on the standard, created simply by piling all the good stuff on top of standard distro. -- It's a man's life in a Python Programming Association. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
