What can be done in PYAN is to encourage all 3rd party library developers to centralize their libraries in it, which I think all will gladly respond. All that is needed to be deposited in PYAN is a description file, like the simplest setup.py file. All that is needed in this description file is 1. where to download the source codes (e.g. CVS)? 2. version number? 3. standard stuffs (optional) like authors, descriptions, copyright?
To copy all of what CPAN does, you need to know what other modules it depends on, so you can automatically download those as well.
Yes, dependencies are necessary to be declared. The maintainers of each package should list the dependencies as well to make it work.
Python can then have a built-in mechanism to read the description file and download the source codes and do the standard "sudo python setup.py install" to install the library into site-package.
I don't like this - it would make Python depend on sudo being available. I'd rather it not do that, and let each systems administrator issue the command according to *their* security policy.
If you are installing packages into your home directory, then sudo is not needed. But if you are installing it for everybody's use, then it is necessary. Fink runs using superuser privileges.
I think something like this can be set up for Python quite easily. I recall some time back, there's a long discussion about setting up Python's version of CPAN but I can't recall the contents of the discussions.
It's not clear it's easy. It's *very* clear it won't happen until
someone steps up to do it. The latter is a problem.
I've posted my method in catelog-sig list. And is willing to offer some time on it... if that helps... But to get it working, I think it will need 5-10x more time than I can put into it...
Cheers maurice
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