John Stowers <[email protected]> wrote: > A bit of an aside, but what is the general policy for similar software - > use the distribution package manager and package system to install the > software or use eggs? Is it ever feasible to mix the two?
That is very well feasible: in fact, tools exist to create OS distribution packages from source distributions that are prepared to be released as eggs. Note that packaging Python software at the OS level isn't a substitute for releasing it as an egg on the Python package index or in a similar place. Aside from the issue of covering all relevant OS distributions, there are a variety of circumstances where one doesn't actually want to use a library such as pygtk as installed system-wide: - deployments of larger systems that don't come packaged at all but require a particular version of the library that the OS doesn't carry (currently or at all), - simultaneous installations of several such systems with conflicting version or build requirements, - installations with a need for an exact set of available libraries due to incompatibilities or the requirement to run in the precise environment that was used to test the system, without anything added by the OS, - development environments, ... A number of tools such as zc.buildout exist to set up such sandboxed environments: they may use Python configured such that no OS-installed additional libraries are used, maybe even a custom-built Python, they determine dependencies of the system by looking at the egg metadata and install any requirements by retrieving them as eggs from indexes such as pypi.python.org and they wire up everything in a way that is completely independent from how the OS would happen to do so. For reasons such as these, it would be very helpful to release Python software as eggs, both to allow installing it directly as eggs and to make it easier for OS distributors to create their flavor of packages from those eggs using existing tools. Not least, the egg format is an established standard in the Python community and using it for distributing one's software contributes to being a good citizen of that community. Let me emphasize again that I propose to help distribute pygtk and friends as eggs, possibly by sprinting on the subject with those of you who might happen to be at this year's Europython conference. -- Viele Grüße, Thomas
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