Re: [Pythonsiphon-devel] features

[Suchandra T. <s-t...@al...>]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 05:25:14AM +0100, Gerhard Häring wrote:
> I've recently converted to Debian from SuSE (RPM based), so I could
> perhaps help with or at least test the dpkg stuff. I've also created
> several RPM packages and I'm maintaining one FreeBSD "port". I think I
> know RPM reasonably well.

    The problem with debian installs is that distutils doesn't have any
support for creating a deb package.  I would need to write that, but 
really don't consider it a priority at the moment.

> I think binary packages are much more important, because that's the only
> reasonable choice for most Python users on some platforms like Windows
> (the chances somebody has installed Cygwin or mingw32 or even Visual C++
> are pretty slim on win32).

    I think I'm beginning to agree with your assesment.  Although I would
really prefer that the rpm installs work, the fact that it requires packages
have a MANIFEST or MANIFEST.in file otherwise the build will fail makes me
believe that it may be more productive to focus on other issues right now.

> Is the project currently about the ultimate Python package management
> system or more a proof-of-conept? That's IMO an important point. I'm
> personally looking at it more as a proof-of-concept. But these are very
> important, too.

    I initially started this out as a proof of concept program in the 
hopes that design issues could be discussed and tested.  However, ciphon
seems to be heading towards being an actual package management system for
production use.  

> So IMHO we shouldn't try to cram all the features in: native package
> management is not so imporant IMHO, binary packages are, so are
> different methods of unpacking like .tar.gz and .zip.

    Cross platform support is an important area.  Although I'm not entirely 
sure about the best way, I'll probably put some sort of support for it in
and see how well it works.


> Other useful features would be uninstalling and upgrading packages and
> their dependencies, but once package dependencies are recorded, this
> would probably be trivial.

    Upgrading should be okay, uninstalling would be more difficult since
distutils doesn't record the installed files for packages.  That's one of
the reasons why I wanted native support.  However, the perl CPAN shell
doesn't seem to support uninstallation either.

-- 
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Suchandra S. Thapa 
s-t...@al...

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