[Distutils] tracking requested vs dependency installs in PEP 376 metadata

[Lennart Regebro]

2009/10/11 Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com>:
>>> That is, I install "SuperWebFramework==1.0" which happens to depend on
>>> peak-rules. I later start using peak-rules in my own simple scripts
>>> (without
>>> a setup.py or other explicit dependency information), and yet later
>>> decide
>>> to uninstall "SuperWebFramework".  If I understand the proposal correctly
>>> the uninstallation of "SuperWebFrameWork" would break my scripts.
>>
>> Yes of course.
>
> IMHO that is a bad experience for the user, because it is very unintuitive
> that I have to explicitly install something that's already installed to
> ensure that it doesn't go away in the future.

But this is how all installs/uninstalls work and MUST work. If you
uninstall the software that you use, then you can't use it. It's a
simple necessity of life.

> This might work in a serious
> development environment, but can end up to be very annoying and confusing
> for casual users.

Can you come up with something better? How will the packaging registry
know that you want a particular package installed if you don't tell
it?

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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