On Sep 6, 2012 5:33 PM, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On 6 September 2012 22:18, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
I prefer that paths in record are always relative to the parent
directory of
record (usually site-packages) unless a relative path would not work (drive letter boundaries). Consider installing and then chroot.
That's a much simpler rule and I agree in principle that it's preferable. The problems are:
1. It's much further away from what PEP 376 specifies. I will accept this happily if there is general agreement that it's OK, but I preferred to start with a more conservative suggestion :-) 2. Do you really want long strings of ../../.. if a distribution specifies a file to be installed in an absolute location (possible, although probably not well supported by current tools). Consider a package that installs something to /var/python (I'm not a Unix user, so this may be an unconvincing example, but I understand that similar things *are* possible). If Python is in /usr, you'd have RECORD with something like ../../../../var/python. I don't have enough Unix experience to know if anyone would care about this. Of course what I know about chroot implies this would break in that scenario anyway...
Fyi in pip all the installed - files paths are relative to installed-files.txt itself - even more dots.
As I say, if the Unix people are OK with it, I'm happy to go this way.
Of course, I'd be happy to mandate that files in a distribution should never be installed anywhere that isn't defined as one of the sysconfig defined paths - but suggesting that would be sure to start a much bigger debate that I don't want to get into as I don't have the expertise to referee it.
Paul.