Folks: I'm sorry, but I am not caught up on the current conversation about packaging. I'm very busy with exciting Python development -- http:// allmydata.com and http://allmydata.org . I understand from PJE's message that he thinks I misunderstand some things about PEP 262; this is entirely possible. I intend to catch up on reading the emails of this conversation and to read carefully PJE's messages about PEP 262 in the coming days.
Meanwhile, here is the last message that I wrote before I got swamped with the aforementioned excitement: On Apr 9, 2008, at 5:59 PM, Greg Ewing wrote: > Paul Moore wrote: > >> I believe that Mac OS X goes for an even simpler structure - >> applications store *everything* in the one directory, so that >> install/uninstall is simply a directory copy/remove. > > Yep, and thereby cuts the whole gordian knot, throws the > pieces on the fire and burns them. :-) > > Package managers have always seemed to me to be an > excessively complex solution to a problem that needn't > have existed in the first place. Yes! I love the Zen of the Mac OS X packaging approach. The best install is none at all! (Of course, I also love apt.) > I keep hoping that someday Linux will support something > like MacOSX application bundles and frameworks, but I > haven't seen any sign of it yet. We're slowly approaching this level of simplicity in packaging of the *source code* of Allmydata.org "Tahoe", using setuptools. http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html The list of dependencies which are automatically resolved by setuptools is visible here: [1]. It currently includes zfec, foolscap, simplejson, pycryptopp, nevow, zope.interface, twisted, and pywin32. This automatic resolution of dependencies works while fully preserving the user's ability to use their own packages and their own packaging tools. That is: 1. If any of these dependencies are already installed, such as in a Debian package or if the user has installed them by hand, then installing Tahoe will use the already-installed versions and not install anything new, and 2. For any of these dependencies that are not already installed, installing Tahoe will *not* write these dependencies into your standard system directory (which is potentially a sacred place where only your own packaging tool or your root account is allowed to tread) but will instead write them into a local, newly-created install directory from which you can then run Tahoe. (This part is similar in spirit to the Mac OS packaging technique.) Also, this install process never downloads anything from the Internet at install time, per our policy [2, 3], which also happens to be a policy some other people have, e.g. [4, 5]. This works on all of our supported platforms, which includes Linux, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, and Mac OS X. Oh yes, we also have our buildbot [6] automatically produce Debian packages for edgy, feisty, etch, and gutsy. As far as I know, all of this is accomplished without breaking any of the use cases traditionally associated with setuptools / easy_install, for example "easy_install allmydata-tahoe" works, and if you want "setup.py install" to install into your standard system directory, it will. The reason that I am posting this is to let other programmers know that setuptools is actually a pretty useful tool, even if the use cases that you want to support are incompatible with certain easy_install traditions such as fetching new packages from the internet at buildtime or installing into your system directory. Regards, Zooko P.S. Two days ago I was able to remove twisted from the list of "Manual Dependencies" that people have to be aware of in order to try out Allmydata Tahoe from the source tarball. I think I can safely remove pyOpenSSL now, but that remains to be properly tested by our buildbot. I will be able to remove Crypto++ soon, due to the pycryptopp [7] library. If I can figure out a hack to work-around one of the major frustrations of setuptools (that you can't simply run "./setup.py install --prefix=$FOO"), and if I finish my setuptools plugin to run Twisted trial instead pyunit when "./setup.py test", then I'll be able to remove GNU make from the dependencies. That will leave only g++, Python, and OpenSSL as packages that a programmer has to manually deal with in order to try out Allmydata Tahoe from source. [1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/_auto_deps.py [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Packaging [3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/229 [4] http://bytes.com/forum/thread666455.html [5] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Python/Eggs [6] http://allmydata.org/buildbot/waterfall?show_events=false [7] http://allmydata.org/trac/pycryptopp _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
