Greg Ewing wrote: > > That looks interesting, but I'm not sure I'd quite > call it "something like". It looks like another case > of adding more complexity to fight existing complexity, > rather than removing the original complexity. >
You won't be able to remove the initial complexity, because it is a feature. Honestly, one of the thing which annoys me the most when I have to use mac os X or windows is the lack of package management. Now, I don't think the situation on linux is ideal either. There are some technical issues, and some social issues; the worst thing to do is to find a technical solution to a social problem, so it is important to separate the two kinds, I think. On windows, most windows developers, as I understand it, do not have a strong need for package manager because they have almost everything they want with visual studio and MS dev tools. On a new linux machine, I may do apt-get install devtools. On windows, I run setup.exe for VS, plus the full Windows SDK. In a way, they do the same thing: providing everything a developer may need with as little hassle as possible for the developer (compilers, api, sdk, docs, etc... in a way which such as all the disparate things work together). > In other words, it seems to be just another package > manager, albeit a particulary nice-sounding one. There are two ways of looking at it, I think. One is to think that linux FHS (and unix in general) is totally broken. I personally really like how gobo linux tries to go around that: http://www.gobolinux.org/ It is like stow on steroids: I try to avoid installing anything from sources which is not handled through stow, and gobolinux just go one step further (quite a big step). The other one is to say disk space is cheap, just bundle everything (ala mac os X). 0install is a partial solution. There are also projects like klik or glick (done by a Red Had employer), which may be more similar to what you are after: Note that mac os X is a combination of the two in some ways. cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig