On Jun 21, 1:10 pm, Harry George <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ...at least around here. > > I run a corporate Open Source Software Toolkit, which makes hundreds > of libraries and apps available to thousands of technical employees. > The rules are that a) a very few authorized downloaders obtain > tarballs and put them in a depot and b) other users get tarballs from > the depot and build from source. > > Historically, python packages played well in this context. Install > was a simple download, untar, setup.py build/install. > > Eggs and with other setuptools-inspired install processes break this > paradigm. The tarballs are incomplete in the first place. The builds > sometimes wander off to the internet looking for more downloads. The > installs sometimes wander off to the internet looking for > compatibility conditions. (Or rather they try to do so and fail > because I don't let themn through the firewall.)
I understand your situation and I have some misgivings myself. It reminds me of the time when I worked in a 'corporate environment' and I was trying to install a Perl application to get round the internet blocking. The application (localproxy - very good) was *intended* to be installed via CPAN for tracking requirements - which didn't work behind our proxy firewall. Although the project author (a very technical guy) knew the direct dependencies, some of these had dependencies. He *didn't know* the full dependency set for his project. Eventually, through trial and error (and a lot of help from the author) I was able to get it working. But it was painful. My guess is that a lot of the world's computers are behind firewalls or proxies that preclude automatic dependency resolution. *However*, there is a very good reason why setuptools and eggs are gaining in popularity (and will continue to do so). For the majority of users eggs are just *so damned convenient*. Being able to do ``easy_install some_project`` and have it just work is fantastic. There are probably ways round this. For most non-esoteric eggs it should be possible to create an ordinary installation tarball from an egg. If you do easy_install of a project into a bare Python installation (a VM instance for example) then you should be able to see which dependencies are fetched. If this is too much then I fear that you may be SOL... Fuzzyman http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ironpython/index.shtml -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
