Re: when and why did python(-minimal) become essential?

["Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de>]

Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> I definitely agree we should listen to the Python community,

Well, my *personal* view is this: I agree that it is highly
desirable that the "python" package is the entire thing, with
all batteries included. I'm uncertain what to think about
offering systems that only have a "minimal" python, which
would have "python" not installed, yet /usr/bin/python present.

On the one hand, I think it is fair to require people to install
the "python" package if they want Python. OTOH, it is likely
also confusing to tell people that they need to install
"python" even though /usr/bin/python is already present.

I cannot guess how many support requests we would get
from people which fail to install the python package.

We surely get a lot of requests from people asking
why some Python program fails, just because some Linux
distributions manage to install an incomplete library
even though the user requested the python package
of that distribution.

In that category, the most frequent issue is that
people cannot run distutils applications, either
because the entire distutils library is missing, or
because the header files are missing.

The next most frequent issue is that people complain
they cannot run IDLE (because Tkinter was not
installed).

Regards,
Martin