[Zope-dev] trying out the buildout-based Zope 2.12...

[Wichert Akkerman]

Previously Chris Withers wrote:
> If you're proposing fixing it in buildout because getting changes made 
> to setuptools and then getting a release of setuptools made is damned 
> near impossible, then that's sad state of affairs for the whole python 
> community :-(

You can compare this with dpkg and apt on Debian and Ubuntu systems:
dpkg is the lower level install that installs one or more packages. It
only checks if the packages you install break any package conflicts
and if their dependencies are met. It is simpler than easy_install: it
will not look for or download packages itself. Python does not have a
such a low level tool - I think it would be useful to factor that out of
setuptools into a separate package.

Apt is the higher level tool: you give it a list of places where it can
find packages (similar to pypi indices, except it does not have a
download url concept (which tends to only hurt you anyway) and it
figures out what should be done to install a set of packages without
violating any constraints. Once it knows how to do this it downloads the
packages and calls dpkg to do the actuall installation.

I think it makes sense to have a similar approach in python: have a pure
installation tool (a subset of easy_install) as well as higher level
tools such as zc.buildout which have all the logic necessary to find
packages to install and figure out a strategy to get to a target working
set.

Wichert.

-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.