Python stuff

[Andrew Jorgensen]

On 2/20/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> John Richard Moser wrote:
> > How about relegating these to ubuntu-devel-python, and also spawning an
> > ubuntu-devel-c and ubuntu-devel-objective-c and ubuntu-devel-php and so
> > on?  It'd save on bloat.
>
> Ubuntu is comitted to providing a complete Python development
> environment out of the box. It's a conscious decision, made without
> pretense of language neutrality, and it's very unlikely to change.

I could only find mention of python in the FAQ on the main site (as
far as anything official goes).  I'd love to hear something more
official about it.  When I first started hearing arguments about this
I thought "big deal, it's not like it takes a lot of space or time"
but if it's 41.8MB unpacked (not to mention the time it will spend
compiling the modules, and the space those compiled modules will use)
I think I would like to voice my objection as well.  But let's be
reasonable about this.  Profanity certainly needn't be involved, and
rarely helps your position.

How do these modules rank according to popularity-contest?  How many
Ubuntu users who want to learn python would have trouble installing an
ubuntu-devel-python package?  Would it be worth somehow putting these
devel packages into gnome-app-install?  Or some other way?

My philosophy as a sysadmin has always been to keep things as standard
as possible, so I prefer to keep any top-level meta-packages
(ubuntu-desktop) installed.  Another philosophy I have is to not have
anything I don't need installed.  That's not about saving disk space,
it's about reducing complexity.  I don't mean to imply that having
extra python modules is likely to cause an instability of any kind,
but it just feels kinda yucky (contrary to my philosophies) to have
all that stuff installed just in case one of my users wants to learn
how to write an IM client using python.  The two pilosophies conflict
because of this.

I would also rather make room for mono than keep the extra python
stuff if it came to that.  But regardless of what eventually shoves
the python stuff off the install CD it seems that it's only a matter
of time before it will make sense to leave it off and put some other
great software in it's place.

 - Andrew Jorgensen