On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:43 PM, John Gabriele wrote:
> 3. People don't like calling those MyProject-1.0.2.tgz thingies
> "distributions". They keep calling them packages, and when you correct
> them, they say, "[sigh], fine. [eyes roll] 'distribution'."
This is not my experience of the term. It's more that most people *still*
don't know what the term "distribution" means in this context, unless they've
extensively read the distutils documentation. Or that they're talking about
Python "distributions" at the same time as what Linux distributions are doing
with them, and are trying to avoid being ambiguous.
It sure would be nice if we could use a made-up word like "eggs" to refer to
these things. Too bad that's taken too :-\.
> So, here's a suggestion: just call both things (packages and
> distributions) "packages", but then agree to fully qualify the names
> when you need to avoid ambiguity, for example: "I just built a
> distribution-package (or "dist-package" for short) and included
> numerous module-packages in it."
Except, oops, "dist-package" *also* already has a conflicting jargon meaning as
well. This is what Ubuntu calls "packages distributed by the Linux
distribution", i.e. Ubuntu or Debian. See, for example,
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q1/054089.html>. Given that they
introduced the term specifically to disambiguate between the things Python
already calls "distributions", it seems like introducing the same term to refer
to the thing that they were originally talking about would have the opposite
effect of what you intend.
Consulting a thesaurus yields one word that nobody has proposed yet: "Parcel".
Helpfully, it still starts with "P", so we could rename it the "Python Parcel
Index". I have a dim memory hearing this word in a jargon-y context before,
but it's certainly considerably more obscure than "package", "distribution",
"archive", et cetera.
Anybody else like that one?
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