As for the robustness comment, I really have to disagree.
Well, I immediately bow to your greater knowledge as a packager, James. I was speaking from personal experience, rather than a knowledge of hard facts. I have installed hundreds of Perl packages on Linux and other UNIX platforms, and apart from C code compilation issues on AIX-4.x (which is always a bugger) I've never had one fail. Since getting into Python a few weeks back, I've installed about 5 packages on Linux, and I've had to tweak 2 of them. The OP's comments make that 3 out of 6 problem installations that I know of - not a good performance. If you say the Python installations do more with less, I believe you. It just seems, from the evidence I have so far, that they don't do it as well. --
eatapple core dump