Re: The Python mess in Debian
Luk Claes wrote:
> AFAIK python-central does have the necessary tools to clean up.
As soon as you use the 'nomove' option it fails to do so properly. Unfortunately
a lot of packages were introduced with this option.
>>> AFAICS
>>> that was already communicated in February [0] and was only really acted
>>> on around DebConf [1].
>> Wrong. Several people tried to contact Matthias on various ways and never got a
>> reply. He also completely failed to communicate with those people who maintain
>> most Python related packages on Debian, except during Debconf. This is *NOT* the
>> way how Python should be maintained. Actually several people already thought
>> abut hijacking Python due to the complete lack of communication with the Python
>> Maintainer, who prefers to force his changes on people instead of finding an
>> acceptable resolution. While I think that large parts of this are the result of
>> him being overworked due to Ubuntu stuff, this is not the way how things should
>> go. During Debconf [1] came up, but I can't see it happen soon as there are
>> *way* too many problems with the proposal, and it would bring us back to
>> pre-Etch areas..
>
> You seem to misunderstand what the problems to be solved are and what
> the proposed solution would bring.
I understand it pretty well. Yes, it solves several problems, unfortunately it
brings many more, which are much more pain than the problems it solves. Shipping
pre-compiled files in the .deb packages instead of using helper tools is what we
had before Etch, with the difference that we had a package for each Python version.
The main problem with the proposed solution is that we'd need binNMUs for
arch:all packages. Another annoying thing would be that we won't have the
namespace handling of python-support any more - which means that we'd have a
package with an empty __init__.py file in the worst case, so you can depend on
it - or you'd have to do other ugly things...
> AFAICT, the real problem is that after unpack many python modules do not
> work as they use symlink hackery in the postinst.
What do you mean exactly? Could you point me to an example?
The only problem I see is that it starts to become complicated as soon as you
want to run a daemon, as the .pyc files are not compiled yet when the daemon is
started.
Cheers,
Bernd
--
Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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