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On Thu, July 26, 2007 12:46 pm, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>At 02:13 PM 7/26/2007 -0500, Dave Peterson wrote:
>><I>In further discussions at Enthought, we're now thinking that creating a</I>
>><I>'docs' dir as a top-level under python itself makes sense, and then the</I>
>><I>installation of eggs could copy docs and/or examples there in a manner</I>
>><I>similar to how it handles scripts into the platforms scripts dir. It</I>
>><I>would make sense that they should be put in dirs named with a format</I>
>><I>like <project name>-<version> so that the user could differentiate the</I>
>><I>docs for each project they installed. If this was done, it seems like</I>
>><I>it wouldn't be too hard for Stan, and other rpm builders, to either</I>
>><I>create symbolic links or copy these to /usr/share/doc in order to</I>
>><I>maintain compatibility with the LSB.</I>
>This isn't a bad idea, although I think that there are some hurdles
>that need to be worked out. My general thought is that, were
>easy_install to support documentation, it would need to take an
>option to determine the documentation base directory, and have a
>--no-docs install option.
>One issue is that under most RPM systems, package names are more like
>'python-foobar-1.2', and 'foobar' may not even be the exact distutils
>name of the package. So, installing the docs to the correct location
>in the general case may be more complex. Note, however, that
>bdist_rpm offers a --doc-files option, which of course can be
>configured via setup.cfg. I have no idea how it works, though, so
>don't ask me. :)
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The practice of changing the name of the whatever package to python-whatever may be distro dependent. Also (thankfully), python-whatever is installed in site-packages/whatever and not in site-packages/python-whatever. It was not always that way. Back at something like RedHat 7, they did change the names and the installation locations. If you had something else that imported the package, you had to go in and change the code to match their changed name.<BR>
<BR>
I can understand the reasons of the distros and repositories for doing this (keeping all the python or other language packages together in the list) but that does not make it less annoying. In looking to see if a package is in the repository, you have to look in various places beyond what the original developer/maintainer of the package calls it.<BR>
<BR>
Also, I'm not sure of the split between /usr/share/whatever and usr/share/doc/whatever for things like docs, tests, examples, and other miscellaneous files. It tends to be at the whim of the packager.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
Stan Klein
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