Re: RFC: New package "python"

[David Coe <david.coe@someotherplace.org>]

Gregor Hoffleit <flight@mathi.uni-heidelberg.de> writes:

> I'd like to hear your comments about a change which may or may not make it
> into potato:
> 
> Currently "python" is an virtual package only, provided by python-base. I'd
> like to turn "python" into a real package with the upcoming new revision of
> the Python packages:
> 
> Package: python 
> Source: python
> Depends: python-base, python-dev, python-gdbm, python-mpz, python-tk, idle,
>  python-zlib, python-examples
> Suggests: python-doc, python-elisp
> Description: An interpreted, interactive, OO language (full distribution)
>  This package installs the complete Python distribution as availble from
>  www.python.org, featuring e.g.
>  . 
>  - Tkinter, a platform-indepedent GUI toolkit, based on Tk
>  - IDLE, a Python integrated development environment, written in Tkinter
>  - the environment for building Python extensions in C
>  .
>  If you don't need all of these, don't use this package, but only
>  python-base.
> 
>  
> I.e. this package would install in all packages that are included in the
> Python distribution, drawing in the necessary dependencies if not yet
> installed (libgdbmg1, libgmp2, zlib1g, tcl8.0, tk8.2).
> 
> Therefore a newbie user can select "python" and will get a typical Python
> installation. Experienced users can strip down the system by using
> "python-base".
> 
> I'm not sure about python-tk and idle, though, since they depend on X11 at
> last. As well arguable are the packages that are now in Suggests (elisp
> depends on an emacsen), should I include python-doc in the Depends ?
> 
> 
> Comments ?
> 
>     Gregor
>     

This sounds like a task package to me, too, but maybe I misunderstand
what you said; would it include anything besides the dependencies? 

Also note that we still have (well, recently had, at least) some packages 
which depend on 'python':

Package: bg5ps
Package: pythondoc
Package: sketch

If what you suggest is just a task package, I'll add it to the
forthcoming task-python-* collection; I agree it's a nice idea to get
all the official python pieces via one package.

Let me know!
Thanks.