On Apr 8, 2009, at 4:27 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
1. (Meta-requirement) I want to be able to download a Windows installer[1] for *every* package I need. 1a. This means that the barrier for packagers building Windows installers should be as low as possible. 1b. It also means that other formats (e.g. eggs) should offer no benefit over Windows installers
I personally, as a consumer of other people's software, prefer to acquire their packages as sdist .tar.gz's or as .eggs on all platforms, including Windows, which I use regularly. So your and my preferences as a consumer of packages differ on this. Fortunately, as far as the distutils is concerned "Windows installers" vs. "sdists" vs. "eggs" are not mutually exclusive. The distutils will provide a standard for metadata so that all of those distribution formats can have the same metadata, and it will allow automation such as bdist_msi and sdist_dsc (from stdeb) so that it can become easier for developers to produce these things. By the way, the exact same sorts of preference-among-consumers issues arises on the Linux side (which I also use regularly), where some people mistakenly think that they want distutils to support eggs worse, when what they really want is for it to support debs better (which I hope stdeb will ultimately do).
Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
