[Zope3-dev] Re: Packaging pre-proposal/notes

[Martijn Faassen]

Richard Jones wrote:

> This is getting off-topic now, but I think it's important to reiterate 
> Anthony's comment. Send Code. Distutils and PyPI are open to further 
> development. Some people at some stage had some spare time to put in 
> the effort to get something implemented. In my case, I knew I had to 
> explicitly narrow the scope of PyPI or I'd never finish, and 
> dependencies didn't make the cut.

To make things absolutely clear: my intent with the original mail 
describing it is taking a while for Python to come up with a CPAN 
equivalent was not to indicate that this is pathetic but that it's a 
hard nut to crack. Not so much technologically but organisationally for 
two reasons:

  * it's hard to make people adopt any solution.

  * it's not a high priority for most people, so harder to find volunteers.

And again, the action that was taken was step-by-step, over the years, 
and I suggested some follow-on steps.

I still think they stand:

  * enable configuration information besides Python code in setup.py, so 
that it becomes declarative. As described by Jeremy Hylton, distutils 
doesn't enforce this information to be in Python.

  * work out a system for dependency tracking.

I think Tres makes good points about distutils having some missing 
abilities which are necessary when distributing applications. Adding 
these could be another step.

I would encourage us to build this on top of distutils if at all 
possible, as doing it completely by ourselves will either result in 6 
more years, or only us using it, or nothing ever happening. None of 
these is desirable.

Regards,

Martijn