Packaging and Running Python
When the Python programming language was first released in the early 1990s, a Python application was run by pointing the Python scripts to the interpreter. Everything related to packaging, releasing, and distributing Python projects was done manually. There was no real standard back then, and each project had a long README on how to install it with all its dependencies.
Bigger projects used system packaging tools to release their work—whether it was Debian packages, RPM packages for Red Hat Linux distributions, or MSI packages under Windows. Eventually, the Python modules from those projects all ended up in the site-packages
directory of the Python installation, sometimes after a compilation phase, if they had a C extension.
The Python packaging ecosystem has evolved a lot since then. In 1998, Distutils
was added to the standard library to provide essential support to create installable distributions for Python projects. Since...