Installation and distro packaging
Opened this issue · 2 comments
We should design an installation method, such as the common setup.py. We should also think about future packaging for Linux distributions.
Inet opinions on distribution tools vary, but I'm also inclined to try the alleged bare-bones standard, distutils, first.
Many of the complaints I've seen involve dependencies--packages on which the distributed package depends but which may be missing on a user's system. PyYaml would be an example in our case. Ideally, dependencies would installed automatically during setup if needed. In reality, problems occur: developers of dependencies neglect to list all dependencies of their packages, proper versions of dependencies are unavailable for some operating systems, dependencies with extensions are distributed as source, but a user doesn't have a C compiler, and so ad infinitum.
BTW, distutils alleges that it can create built distributions which include RPM's and Windows installers. They don't mention Debian, Arch, Suse, etc., but there is at least one tool for Debian which actively maintained (last commit a week ago.)