On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Phillip J. Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:

Second, there were no uninstall tools for it, so I'd have had to
write one myself. (Zed's "easy_f'ing_uninstall" to the contrary, it
ain't easy, and I have an aversion to deleting stuff on people's
systems without knowing what will break. There's a big difference
between them typing 'rm -rf' themselves, and me doing it.)

Agree. I tried a while ago to write a "easy_uninstall" but this
is not possible from an application-point of view, to do clean things.

zc.buildout resolves this by installing eggs locally, to an isolated
environment, so my main Python installation doesn't hold any extensions
at all.

So if a database of installed package is created, I would be in favor of
an application-oriented system where it is possible to create, update, install,
a set of packages dedicated to an environment (default would be Python).
Maybe by having a namespace tied to a list of versions.

In other words; having the same feature virtualenv provides, in Python
itself, and define somehow how to switch to it.

$ easy_install the.package --environment MyApp