At 11:37 PM 4/10/2008 +0200, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:

Phillip,

I am not sure (haven't verified) if my email ever got through to the list, but with FreeBSD's Perl installation an additional module gets installed that registers every CPAN installed module as a pkg in FreeBSD's pkg system.

Given the recent bruhaha about the setuptools and eggs (hey, from a programmer and sysadmin point of view I like 'm) I wonder if this would be easier for the discussion if you could dump a prototype on the table.

If it would help I can see if I can cook up something.

At this point, it has become clear to me that the package database isn't really necessary for other systems. easy_install could simply not uninstall things that it doesn't find listed in its *own* metadata. Really, the only technical hurdle remaining to solving egg-free installation is setting up a namespace package's __path__ correctly, in a situation where: 1. The user has system packages contributing to the namespace in a "site" directory, 2. There is no __init__.py in the namespace under that site directory, 3. There are non-egg packages on PYTHONPATH that contribute to the same directory, and 4. Two versions of the same module within that namespace have been installed, one in site-packages and the other on PYTHONPATH Actually, there are various other criteria involved, such as whether pkg_resources is imported or not, and whether the setuptools site.py hack is employed in the PYTHONPATH directory. For example, if pkg_resources were imported (which normally happens when setuptools-installed scripts are run), it would be possible to have it do the sorting, and thus ensure that there's never a problem like that. What it would not fix, is the circumstance where you just pop into the Python interpreter with your PYTHONPATH set, if you have the above situation. And the above situation is going to occur anytime you're using PYTHONPATH to get a later version of something that uses a namespace package. So, the other alternative is to keep the 'site.py' hack in effect, but either change the contents of that site.py or add extra information to a .pth file so that the namespaces get sorted at that point. There would still be a hacked site module at that point, but at least upgrading the site.py would let us get rid of the need to load any .pth files from the directory, put eggs ahead of other things, etc. For that matter, the site.py wouldn't be needed unless you were installing things with namespace packages in it. (Unfortunately, looking at site-packages to see if the hack is needed won't help, since you might install a conflicting system package *later*.)