On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > I'm actually asking a serious question. How does a distro "actively hide" > something publicly available on the Internet? Note that, on Linux (when > you talk about "distributions", you probably don't mean OS X or Windows) > all the compiler tools needed to install from source are readily > available, so anyone who wants to install a Python version not supported > by their distro can do so. Many people don't wish to install anything > outside of their distro's supported packages, but that's their choice, > not the distro imposing anything on them.
I'd say it's not so much "actively hide" as just "abandon people to their own devices". It's all very well to say "well hey, just go and compile it from source"; this assumes two things: 1) The available source code will compile on your platform 2) The user knows how to compile code. The first is true of the platforms supported by python.org, but that's not the OS/distribution helping you to get Python - that's Python helping you to get Python. The second... that's where things like "apt-get build-dep" come in, but mainly there's a general understanding among end users that compiling code is haaaaaaard. Some cultures have this more strongly than others... sometimes for good reason. (I had stupid amounts of trouble trying to get a C compiler going on OS X. A non-programmer, doing the same job, might well give up, and I wouldn't argue.) Compiling from source without a package manager fetching all the appropriate libraries means an iterative process of "compile or build, see what the error is, figure out what's missing, fetch it, GOTO 10". For me, that's life; that's something I've done on a number of different systems, and I know lots of the clues and/or the tools for figuring things out. For many non-programmers, though, if there's no binary package, they won't use the software. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
