2006-12-02»
Things Which Should Get More Publicity But Don't - Easy_Install, Python's package system»So I've made an important life decision to spend more time with Python. I think this may be a sign of middle age. I'm of the opinion that there comes a time in one's life when one should settle down with one language, and slowly encrust into COBOLic fuddy-duddyism in preparation for barking at youngsters about Lisp, and my time has come. I'll still flirt with Ruby, and Perl, and Smalltalk, but I'll try and actually get good at Python. Also, EFF is, if you really tied it the ground and submitted it to extraordinary rendition until until it admitted a preference, a Python shop at heart (with scads of PHP littering the floor).
The one painful goodbye from the fun I've been having with Ruby was the lovely gems package system, which, as so much of Ruby, was like Perl's CPAN in rehab. But I've just discovered that Python's setuputils utility includes an easy_install program that does much the same as gems: seeks out packages by name, downloads them from the ether, seeks out dependencies and downloads them too, and then drops it all sensibly in your site-packages.
Easy Install and setuptools were going to be included in the latest Python 2.5, but for good reasons the author decided to withdraw them. It sounds like the infrastructure is being slowly put in place though. I'm looking forward to finding out what else the Pythonistas have been doing in the past year or so.
And now I'm going to look at Eclipse. Christ, what's happening to me?
