On 26 October 2017 at 18:33, Thomas Kluyver <thomas@kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
Nathaniel raises the point that it may be easier to convince other package managers to regenerate an entry points cache than to call arbitrary Python hooks on install.
At least for RPM, we have file triggers now, whereby system packages can register a hook to say "Any time another package touches a file under <path of interest> I want to know about it". That means the exact semantics of any RPM integration would likely end up just living in a file trigger, so it wouldn't matter to much whether that trigger was "refresh these predefined caches" or "run any installed hooks based on the defined Python level metadata". However, I expect it would be much easier to define a "optionally export data for caching in a more efficient key value store" API than it would be to define an API for arbitrary pre-/post- [un]install hooks. In particular, a caching API is much easier to *repair*, since the "source of truth" remains the installation DB itself - the cache is just to speed up runtime lookups. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia