At 12:33 PM 3/21/2008 +0000, Paul Moore wrote:

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The standard (and to me, preferable) way of dealing with such

On 21/03/2008, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote: things is to

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have an 'installation manager' that can reinstall as well as delete and that has a check box for various things to delete. This is what Python needs.

I'd dispute strongly that this is a "standard". It may be preferable, but I'm not sure where you see evidence of it being a standard.

I presume he means that there are a lot of entries in his Add/Remove Programs that work like that, and that it's an emerging standard for Windows. (Certainly I've seen quite a few entries like that in mine, although more often than not they only have one checkbox!)

Could I also point out that *if* such a standard is set up for Python, bdist_wininst and bdist_msi should be modified to follow it. Otherwise, it's not a standard, more of competing approach.

The best thing to do would be to get a standard (ala PEP 262, but modified by the benefit of experience now) for tracking installed Python package distributions. Then we can standardize on platform tools for managing this data, and include them in the relevant platform distributions. (And that would include making bdist_wininst and bdist_msi follow this installation DB standard.)