Packaging

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Martijn Faassen has posted a nice history of packaging and distribution tools for Python. Yes, it's a topic only a geek could love, but anyone who wants to distribute software to other people needs to grapple with these issues. The question is, should these tools, the problems that motivate them, and the technology underlying them be part of this course? Or should something equivalent (and if so, what)?