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Fri Oct 3 14:57:40 EDT 2003 · http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2003-October/008922.html

On Friday, October 3, 2003, at 10:44  AM, Just van Rossum wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> I think Jack is thinking too much about source package installs,
>> while you and I are focused on binary package installs?  The binary
>> ones are the real win of PackMan, and the source package installs
>> would be icing on the cake, mostly.
>
> Yes. I'd even go so far as to not support source installs at all...
>
> Who needs source installs? I think it's only people who (for example)
> have their own private extension modules that extend Numeric. That
> should be a _very_ small group of people, and a rather savvy group at
> that: they might as well install Numeric without PackMan.
>
> Here's an issue that I'm not totally clear about: there are packages
> that need external frameworks, I think wxPython and Tcl/Tk are the main
> examples here. Are these special cases, or does PackMan need to
> _generally_ support installing external libraries? If the latter, what
> kind of consequences does that have for cross-platform support? Is that
> a reasonable goal/requirement at all?

I think PackMan needs to generally support installing external 
libraries (Python in general is great as a wrapper for C++ modules), 
but I think the solution to the cross-platform is to have platform 
specific databases, as Jack has been doing. You can still have 
cross-platform packages (i.e. all Python source), they just need to be 
added to each of the platform specific databases. The platform-specific 
packages can just point to a different install file on each platform. 
The only problem is that for some people this is doing three times the 
work when it's really redundant.

Or, maybe a better solution is to have one database, but allow for each 
package to load different binary files for each platform, or to even 
'block' a platform from installing it if there are incompatibilities. 
This would be more efficient overall, I think.

I'm not sure source is particularly needed either. What I don't like is 
the idea that I get double the number of packages in my package list 
because there's a separate entry for binary and for source. Source 
install support would be OK with me, but only if it is unobtrusive to 
users who don't need it.

Thanks,

Kevin

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