Harry George wrote: > ...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.)
Have you considered establishing a policy that these setuptools-using packages should be installed using the --single-version-externally-managed option to the install command? This does not check for dependencies. Alternately, you can provide a company repository of the tarballs and their depedencies tarballs. Your users can use the easy_install option --find-links to point to that URL such that they do not have to go outside of the firewall to install everything. > 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'm sorry to hear that. > 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. Given the options I outlined above, you can easily satisfy these requirements for the vast majority of setuptools-using packages that are out there. There are a handful of packages that only distribute the eggs and not the source tarballs, but those are rare. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list