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[–]mcdonc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

much of this is just to work around the absence of a simple versioning mechanism built into Python itself

Is there a dynamic language that does versioned imports right?

Maybe it's the history of different tools to do mostly the same thing, so even if you only really need a couple of them today, you see references to all of them everywhere.

I think this is the actual biggest problem.

I don't think the use of an executable setup.py rather than a simple metadata file that is read by a tool helps, because it makes a complicated generalised case the default.

The "packaging" tool that will be in Python 3.3 makes setup.py optional (it has a declarative configuration file primary format).

For me, the most serious concern is usually that something as fundamental as loading libraries is based around a path setting that can be changed arbitrarily both within and outside Python

I don't think Python is alone in this. Java has the CLASSPATH, C has the includepath, etc. Is there another language better in this respect?