At 11:19 AM 3/22/2008 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
Not exactly. More like, "package management tool X claims exclusive rights to this package". Python tools would always defer this right to the system packager, i.e. a system packager is not obliged to respect a Python tool's claim to a file, but not the other way around.
That way, system packaging tools don't need to do anything but mark the installed files as belonging to them.
This probably needs to be refined a little. Exclusive right is too strong, and it goes against Paul Moore's desire for using a single tool. Perhaps instead what it should be is an "uninstall warning" field that must be displayed to a user if an interactive program is doing uninstallation, and that a non-interactive program must refuse to uninstall unless explicitly requested to go ahead. Unfortunately, a warning message might then need to be localized. So this idea still needs some work.