Paul Moore p.f.moore@gmail.com writes:
2009/7/1 R. David Murray rdmurray@bitdance.com:
The uninstall function is part of that infrastructure, but since distutils isn't a package manager itself (it's an install program), distutils as currently organized can't really handle uninstall except as outlined in a section you may have clipped from the above context (ie: when setup.py from the original package is available).
From a Windows user's POV, "install program" = "package manager". And
an install program needs an uninstall feature. I know Linux users with their advanced dependency-managing package managers feel that this is a stone-age view, and they may be right, but the PEP needs to take the Windows situation into account.
Actually, your view seems quite reasonable to me: as a GNU user with my advanced dependency-managing package manager, I feel just as strongly that a program that installs is implicitly promising that it can also uninstall cleanly.
I think that calling distutils an “install program” is confusing. When I discuss distutils, I don't call it a program at all; it's a library (or perhaps “framework”) that provides part of the job of package installation.