On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Dr. Trigon <dr.trigon@surfeu.ch> wrote:

> We had some discussions in the IRC channel about BS. There are so
> many problems about using BS in different systems. So many people
> don't want to run patch.exe and so many people are using servers
> for running bots and don't have permission to do that.

I understand that we had alread several discussion about it indeed. A
hard thing for me is to help or solve the situation because I never
got any feadback WHY running patch.exe is such a big issue? I just
always heard "I don't like it." - ok, but WHY?
It is not dangerous at all AND it is a standard tool, in fact it is
the base on which git works...

One thing that people probably don't like is that it's a completely non-standard workflow. Standard ways of modifying BeautifulSoup include: 1) fixing the upstream distribution, 2) subclassing & overiding behavior, or 3) creating a private fork. What exactly are you patching? The one patch that I found pointed to in the list archives

Bundling dependencies (ie httplib2 in externals) is pretty non-standard too. Why not declare the dependencies and let `pip install` resolve them at installation time. Dependency isolation and private non-system installs can be achieved using virtualenv or a similar tool.

That's how most other Python projects work. Is there a reason it won't work here?

Tom