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Wed Jul 29 07:42:43 CEST 2009 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-July/090916.html

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> David Lyon wrote:
>> Your whole email whilst perphaps technically correct is terribly
>> difficult for a software engineering person to follow.
> 
> It made perfect sense to me.

Like David, I found it a bit disjointed too.
> 
> The words "eggs" brings with it a whole lot more baggage than just the
> sum of the technical parts in the language core that support them
> (primarily distutils and zipimport). I find it unfortunate that the name
> for the distutils metadata format contains the word "egg" because it
> implies much greater consensus around the philosophy behind eggs than
> actually exists.
> 
> A lot of the baggage associated with the "eggs" concept is related to
> the inherent conflict between different approaches to dependency management:
> 1. Use the system package management system for everything (preferred by
> many, perhaps even most, *nix sysadmins, but not an option on Windows)
> 2. Create a Python specific package management system independent of the
> system package manager (an area dominated by setuptools, including both
> eggs and non-zipped package distributions)
> 3. Bundle everything into a monolithic application or framework (the
> typical approach on Windows with py2exe, but also the philosophy behind
> tools like virtualenv)
> 
> All 3 of those philosophies have good arguments in their favour and they
> all have good arguments against them as well. Your comments about your
> package management system suggest that it is just yet another entrant in
> category 2 and you have said nothing to allay the concerns of those that
> despise that philosophy with a passion because of the problems it causes
> them when trying to manage their systems using the first philosophy.
> 
> Since the Python constituency includes developers and system
> administrators that favour all 3 philosophies (and probably other
> variants that I haven't thought to describe), anything that makes it
> into the standard library will need to adequately balance the interests
> of all parties (e.g. as has occurred in the PEP 376 metadata enhancement
> discussions).

However, the above clarifies for me what the alternatives and issues 
are. Thank you for posting.

Terry Jan Reedy

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