On 27Nov2011 23:54, Matt Joiner <anacro...@gmail.com> wrote: | Agreed. I recently gave Haskell a go, and it was remarkable how | similar the package management is to Python's. | | How well does the new "packaging" (set for release in Python 3.3?) | module deal with the problems? | | With a better package management system, the half of the standard | library that nobody uses can be unceremoniously dumped, and their more | recent upstream versions used correctly. Even distutils itself is | "obsolete", the first recommendation people give is to replace it with | distribute and/or pip.
Ah the cheery optimism of the end user. Package systems have a lot of fun complications. Install for the user only? For the whole system? Architecture specific? What if people want access to different versions of a package? What about vendor supplied (eg RPM) versus user obtained? They'll fight, one way or another. What if policy has user supplied installing to its own tree (sensible to avoid conflicts) - the fetch/install kit need to know this. What about stability? Your "half of the standard library that nobody uses can be unceremoniously dumped, and their more recent upstream versions used correctly" leads to bugs in the apps that use the packages if they depend on particular versions/APIs. The stdlib is generally quite careful about breaking APIs but other packagers often are less so. I can make this list bigger or more detailed if you want. All package systems have these issues. They're not as trivial as you might imagine. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ The problem with elections is that the government always wins. - Chris Rudram <csr...@unix.york.ac.uk> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
