RE: Strong and weak points of distutils 1 Was: [Distutils] thoughtson distutils 1 & 2
From: Ronald Oussoren
On 15-mei-04, at 0:23, Lars Immisch wrote:
From Bob:
Not all operating systems have a usable package management system (Win32, Mac OS X, probably others).
What's wrong with Installer.app and/or PackageMaker?
Both are installers, not package management systems. There is no public interface for listing which packages are installed and uninstalling packages, let alone dependency management.
Hmm. I'm not sure I see what you're saying here. If you're saying that a "usable package management system" needs to support a "public interface" for listing which packages are installed, uninstalling packages, and dependency management (which you'd need to define more clearly) then Windows certainly does have one (albeit a bit primitive). Applications which wish to participate in the standard "Add/Remove Programs" interface have to register certain registry keys, so to some extent that would count as a "public interface". Listing & uninstall only, there's no dependency management, but it's a start. And it's what the current bdist_wininst uses, so it's supported by distutils right now. What, specifically, do you need the OS to provide, and why? What real problem exists with the current system? (At least in the context of the "build a standard OS package" commands, like bdist_wininst, bdist_rpm, etc). The only major issue I see is dependency management, and, personally, I'm happy to treat this as a documentation issue (package X documents that it relies on package Y, version a.b or later, and package Z, version c.d). Of course, I don't want automatic downloading of dependencies, uninstalling of dependencies when a package is uninstalled, etc, which maybe others do... Paul. __________________________________________________________________________ This e-mail and the documents attached are confidential and intended solely for the addressee; it may also be privileged. If you receive this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy it. As its integrity cannot be secured on the Internet, the Atos Origin group liability cannot be triggered for the message content. Although the sender endeavours to maintain a computer virus-free network, the sender does not warrant that this transmission is virus-free and will not be liable for any damages resulting from any virus transmitted. __________________________________________________________________________
participants (3)
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Mark W. Alexander
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Moore, Paul
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Ronald Oussoren