At 02:13 PM 7/26/2007 -0500, Dave Peterson wrote:

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In further discussions at Enthought, we're now thinking that creating a 'docs' dir as a top-level under python itself makes sense, and then the installation of eggs could copy docs and/or examples there in a manner similar to how it handles scripts into the platforms scripts dir. It would make sense that they should be put in dirs named with a format

On Thu, July 26, 2007 9:50 pm, Phillip J. Eby wrote: like <project name>-<version> so that the user could differentiate the docs for each project they installed. If this was done, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard for Stan, and other rpm builders, to either create symbolic links or copy these to /usr/share/doc in order to maintain compatibility with the LSB.

This isn't a bad idea, although I think that there are some hurdles that need to be worked out. My general thought is that, were easy_install to support documentation, it would need to take an option to determine the documentation base directory, and have a --no-docs install option.

One issue is that under most RPM systems, package names are more like 'python-foobar-1.2', and 'foobar' may not even be the exact distutils name of the package. So, installing the docs to the correct location in the general case may be more complex. Note, however, that bdist_rpm offers a --doc-files option, which of course can be configured via setup.cfg. I have no idea how it works, though, so don't ask me. :)

The practice of changing the name of the whatever package to python-whatever may be distro dependent. Also (thankfully), python-whatever is installed in site-packages/whatever and not in site-packages/python-whatever. It was not always that way. Back at something like RedHat 7, they did change the names and the installation locations. If you had another program that imported the package, you sometimes had to go in and change the code to match their changed name. I can understand the reasons of the distros and repositories for doing this (keeping all the python or other language packages together in the list) but that does not make it less annoying. In looking to see if a package is in the repository, you have to look in various places beyond what the original developer/maintainer of the package calls it. Also, I'm not sure of the split between /usr/share/whatever and usr/share/doc/whatever for things like docs, tests, examples, and other miscellaneous files. It tends to be at the whim of the packager. In terms of what bdist_rpm does, it seems to be in the preparation of the rpm spec file. The spec file contains scripts (some of which point to macros in /usr/lib/rpm/macros on a Fedora system) and bdist_rpm seems to build the scripts and execute them using rpm-build. The build and install scripts do "python setup.py build" or "python setup.py install" with whatever options are specified. I think the actual location of the files may be governed by the %files section of the spec, but I will have to spend some time looking at other spec files to be sure that is where it happens. Stan Klein