...at least around here. I run a corporate Open Source Software Toolkit, which makes hundreds of libraries and apps available to thousands of technical employees. The rules are that a) a very few authorized downloaders obtain tarballs and put them in a depot and b) other users get tarballs from the depot and build from source.
Historically, python packages played well in this context. Install was a simple download, untar, setup.py build/install. Eggs and with other setuptools-inspired install processes break this paradigm. The tarballs are incomplete in the first place. The builds sometimes wander off to the internet looking for more downloads. The installs sometimes wander off to the internet looking for compatibility conditions. (Or rather they try to do so and fail because I don't let themn through the firewall.) These are unacceptable behaviors. I am therefore dropping ZODB3, and am considering dropping TurboGears and ZSI. If the egg paradigm spreads, yet more packages will be dropped (or will never get a chance to compete for addition). I've asked before, and I'll ask again: If you are doing a Python project, please make a self-sufficient tarball available as well. You can have dependencies, as long as they are documented and can be obtained by separate manual download. Thanks for listening. -- Harry George PLM Engineering Architecture -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list