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Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:46:13 +1100
From: Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>
To: Matt Joiner <anacrolix@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: sick of distribute, setup, and all the rest...
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On 27Nov2011 23:54, Matt Joiner <anacrolix@gmail.com> wrote:
| Agreed. I recently gave Haskell a go, and it was remarkable how
| similar the package management is to Python's.
| 
| How well does the new "packaging" (set for release in Python 3.3?)
| module deal with the problems?
| 
| With a better package management system, the half of the standard
| library that nobody uses can be unceremoniously dumped, and their more
| recent upstream versions used correctly. Even distutils itself is
| "obsolete", the first recommendation people give is to replace it with
| distribute and/or pip.

Ah the cheery optimism of the end user.
Package systems have a lot of fun complications.

Install for the user only? For the whole system?
Architecture specific?
What if people want access to different versions of a package?
What about vendor supplied (eg RPM) versus user obtained? They'll fight,
one way or another. What if policy has user supplied installing to its
own tree (sensible to avoid conflicts) - the fetch/install kit need to
know this.
What about stability? Your "half of the standard library that nobody uses can
be unceremoniously dumped, and their more recent upstream versions used
correctly" leads to bugs in the apps that use the packages if they depend on
particular versions/APIs. The stdlib is generally quite careful about
breaking APIs but other packagers often are less so.

I can make this list bigger or more detailed if you want.  All package
systems have these issues. They're not as trivial as you might imagine.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

The problem with elections is that the government always wins.
        - Chris Rudram <csr100@unix.york.ac.uk>