At 02:37 PM 3/16/2006 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
Another solution is at the package level -- RPMs can overwrite each other's files, if they are spec'd out to do that somehow. This is not very clean -- I don't know which if any package is allowed to ultimately delete that file. With some post-install hooks you could just create the file, and delete when there's nothing left in the package. This would have to be handled for every packaging system. But there's only a couple anyone uses.
Er, define "couple" and "anyone". :) I've heard from folks using Gentoo, RPM, .deb, and win32.exe just to start with. And let's not forget the people doing darwinports and other BSD systems. And that's all only talking about packaging systems that have existing users wrapping setuptools and setuptools-based packages, not general Python-using systems! So it's a bit more than a couple. And I suspect that most, if not all, would just as soon that "setup.py install --root" should "just work" without having to change their build processes, and my proposed solution would ensure that. Indeed, I believe that this fix for namespace packages is probably the last remaining impediment to setuptools' ability to achieve Total World Domination, except for the introduction of .egg-info files in Python 2.5. As far as I can tell, these are the only things left before system packages and user packages can all "just get along".