On Mar 19, 2008, at 3:23 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote: > If other people want to chime in please do so; if this is just a > dialog between Phillip and me I might incorrectly assume > that nobody besides Phillip really cares.
I really care. I've used setuptools, easy_install, eggs, and pkg_resources extensively for the past year or so (and contributed a few small patches). There have been plenty of problems, but I find them to be overall useful tools. It is a great boon to a programming community to lower the costs of re-using other people's code. The Python community will benefit greatly once a way to do that becomes widely enough accepted to reach a tipping point and become ubiquitous. Setuptools is already the de facto standard, but it hasn't become ubiquitous, possibly in part because of "egg hatred", about which more below. I've interviewed several successful Python hackers who "hate eggs" in order to understand what they hate about them, and I've taken notes from some of these interviews. (The list includes MvL, whose name was invoked earlier in this thread.) After filtering out yer basic complaining about bugs (which complaints are of course legitimate, but which don't indict setuptools as worse than other software of comparable scope and maturity), their objections seem to fall into two categories: 1. "The very notion of package dependency resolution and programmable or command-line installation of packages at the language level is a bad notion." This can't really be the case. If the existence of such functionality at the programming language level were an inherently bad notion, then we would be hearing some complaints from the Ruby folks, where the Gems system is standard and ubiquitous. We hear no complaints -- only murmurs of satisfaction. One person recently reported to me that while there are more packages in Python, he finds himself re-using other people's code more often when he works in Ruby, because almost all Ruby software is Gemified, but only a fraction of Python software is Eggified. Often this complaint comes with the idea that eggs conflict with their system-level package management tools. (These are usually Debian/Ubuntu users.) Note that Ruby software is not too hard to include in operating system packaging schemes -- my Ubuntu Hardy apt-cache shows plenty of Ruby software. A sufficiently mature and widely supported setuptools could actually make it easier to integrate Python software into Debian -- see stdeb [1]. 2. "Setuptools/eggs give me grief." What can really be the case is that setuptools causes a host of small, unnecessary problems for people who prefer to do things differently than PJE does. Personally, I prefer to use GNU stow, and setuptools causes unnecessary, but avoidable, problems for me. Many people object (rightly enough) to a "./setup.py install" automatically fetching new software over the Internet by default. The fact that easy_install creates a site.py that changes the semantics of PYTHONPATH is probably the most widely and deservedly hated example of this kind of thing [2]. I could go on with a few other common technical complaints of this kind. These type-2 problems can be fixed by changing setuptools or they can be grudgingly accepted by users, while retaining compatibility with the large and growing ecosystem of eggy software. Certainly fixing setuptools to play better with others is a more likely path to success than setting out to invent a non-egg-compatible alternative. Such a project might never be implemented well enough to serve, and if it were it would probably never overtake eggs's lead in the Python ecosystem, and if it did it would probably not turn out to be a better tool. So, since you asked for my chime, I advise you to publically bless eggs, setuptools, and easy_install as plausible future standards and solicit patches which address the complaints. For that matter, soliciting specific complaints would be a good start. I've done so in private many times with only partial success as to the "specific" part. One promising approach is to request objections in the form of automated tests that setuptools fails, e.g. [3]. Regards, Zooko O'Whielacronx [1] http://stdeb.python-hosting.com/ [2] http://www.rittau.org/blog/20070726-02 And no, PJE's suggested "trivial fix" does not satisfy the objectors, as it can't support the use case of "cd somepkg ; python ./ setup.py install ; cd .. ; python -c 'import somepkg'". [3] http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/2308#comment:5 _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
