[Chandler-dev] Network installer/launcher for Leopard

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:32 AM 10/11/2007 -0700, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
>Andi Vajda wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
> >> Also Debian-based distributions especially have gotten the dependencies
> >> down something excellent. We already have a .deb installer for Chandler
> >> but it lists just a couple of dependencies. On Gutsy Gibbon we could
> >> perhaps go with system Python as well.
> >
> > We should move the build to this model on Ubuntu Linux first, where
> > there is a decent package system - no such thing on leopard by default.
>
>I am not sure I follow you. Exactly because Leopard does not have
>package system I proposed the easy_install model. On Ubuntu we should
>NOT do easy_install, because this should be covered by the package
>system (unless easy_install somehow invoked the package manager on
>Ubuntu). Yes, there really are python-m2crypto, python-thisandthat packages.

Please note that some system packagers (I don't know if Ubuntu is 
one) *strip out* egg metadata from some system packages, which means 
we can't properly detect that they are installed.  So, just because 
e.g. python-m2crypto is installed, doesn't necessarily mean that 
easy_install won't try to download another copy, if it can't *find* 
the one installed by the system.

This sort of behavior should be considered a bug in the system 
packager, since as of Python 2.5 the distutils always include this 
metadata for setuptools' benefit.  However, as I said, some system 
packagers strip it back out for reasons unknown.