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CPAN for python?

Randall Hopper aa8vb at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 8 07:33:37 EDT 2000 
Andrew Kuchling:
 |Shae Erisson <shapr at uab.edu> writes:
 |> If you did it IETF[1] style, I think people would go with it.
 |> [1] IETF motto: 'rough consensus, running code'
 |
 |The distutils work seems to be freezing down nicely...the basic principle
 |of running setup.py seems stable.

Definitely!  I was amazed how easy it was to package a C extension last week.
Very impressive; the feedback I've gotten from early pkg testers mirrors that.

Open problems: We can install packages, but we can't clean them up (save
ad-hoc methods and the "Microsoft approach" [reinstall the OS/Python]).
Hopefully that's next.  Listing what module dists you have, and handling
module dist dependencies isn't covered yet either.


 |So, what would people want on top of distutils?  A Debian-style "do
 |apt-get, upgrade" to update currently installed packages?  A
 |CPAN-style "fetch and install this module for me, please"?  Simple
 |version checking?

Someday, hopefully:

         setup.py install

or some tool will fetch, build, and install, not just the module dist, but
all of its dependencies too.

I guess I've been spoiled by the FreeBSD ports system.  Fetch the small
port for a package and just kick off "make install".  Under the hood, it
fetches source dists from ftp/www sites, and patches, configures, builds,
and installs the package _and_ all its dependent packages, all
automagically.  Simple (particularly good for the newbies).

Wonder if Python could have something similar.  Folks could post URLs to a
"getit.py" (or setup.py) script, and users could literally cut-and-paste
this URL into a Python install tool that would just "do the install".  That
is, don't bother them with where to FTP or surf, how to get the files,
where to put the packages, what the name of the distdir in the tarball is,
etc.  Just install the package and do what it takes to make it happen.
That'd be cool.

-- 
Randall Hopper
aa8vb at yahoo.com
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