Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > As a maintainers of a convenient unified distro, I have to say that > it's a losing strategy. No matter how much you include, for every > person that tells you, "Thank you, you've made my Python experience > better," there are three who say, "Thanks, but could you also include > Package X?" or "Thanks, but Package Y is much better at doing foo than > Package Z? Could you include it next time?" or "When are you going to > update Package W to the latest version?"
It doesn't appear to be a losing strategy for Java, Fedora, GCC, or for that matter Ruby on Rails. Maybe it's more work, but those distros are able to attract enough community effort and/or corporate bucks to get the work done. > You can't satisfy everyone or even a whole lot of people with a single > massive installer. People want different things. I want VTK installed > because I need 3D visualization; I couldn't care less about web > applications. But lots of other people care very deeply about web > applications and don't want to waste 100 MB of disk space on 3D > visualization libraries. If I have a 400GB hard disk in my computer, why should I care whether it's 99.5% empty instead of 99 empty after I get done installing software? > When "one-click installation" entails downloading 150 MB of compressed > data for every update, the convenience begins to pall a bit. Fedora Core is around 4GB and I installed it from a DVD-ROM pretty easily. > Fortunately, there's a better approach, and it's coming soon. The next > iteration of MacEnthon, at least, is going to be based on Python eggs > and easy_install.py. Python eggs are, more or less, Python's answer to > Ruby's gems. > > http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs Cool. That doc page compares them to .jar files, but I don't see any provision for signatures on them like jars have. I hope that can be added sometime. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
