One nice thing about using Python is the simple and easy way to get
libraries and other packages quickly and easily using tools like pypi and
pip. However, when deploying I prefer OS packages (typically RPMs since
I've worked at RHEL/Fedora using shops). Sometimes the libraries I
need are not packaged by upstream and I end up building them myself.
None of that bugs me. What I what I wish was that more OSS projects,
especially some of the smaller libs, would actually release occasionally.
Instead I have to get a copy out of source control, which often has
no release information. This makes me queasy because I have a hard time
telling if the most recent versions are stable. Even if you don't want
to make tarballs, at least periodically tag your releases in a way
that makes us downstream users feel some confidence that your code
isn't halfway in the middle of a refactoring or something.
If it's a "mature" code base, one that changes rarely, stick a release
tag on there once a year or something. I'm going to end up testing this
stuff for my own purposes, but a release tag at least makes me feel
that I'm not going to end up wasting too much of my time on software
left in the lurch. So far some of the worst offenders are on the dev
sites like bitbucket and github. I don't know if my sample size is just
too small or I have bad luck, but I have a guess that in the ye olden days
people had to create a tarball just to get hold of the code, but
these newer sites/tools make it easy for people to skip that step,
and then forget completely about doing a release at all.
I don't actually think anyone is going to listen to me, and I'm going to have
to keep building packages that have strings like "20101114git83848383f3892"
or "20110109hgf110ac096f19" in them. But hope springs eternal :-).
