[Catalog-sig] start on static generation, and caching - apache config.

[Jim Fulton]

On Jul 11, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
...
>> IOW, setuptools' focus is more on distribution filename safety,  
>> rather
>> than on sensible naming distinctions for end users.  The former is  
>> less
>> restrictive than the latter, I believe.
>
> Yes. However, it's not clear to me that the infrastructure needs to
> (or even is able to) enforce sensible naming. Instead, any policing
> that might be necessary should be done in the community. If two
> packages are named too similarly, users will get confused, and
> eventually one package may disappear, get renamed, get its naming
> challenged in court, and so on. It's not the job of the package
> *index* to do that sort of policing.

When Phillip designed setuptools, he tried to have a very low impact  
on lots of systems.  He did that very well and that has allowed  
setuptools to be adopted gradually with very little up front buy in.

One of the decisions Phillip made was to not use an installed-package  
database other than sys.path.  When a distribution is installed, the  
installed file name reflects the package name.  If you want to know  
whether a package is installed, you can scan sys.path looking for  
files or directories that contain/reflect the package name.  IMO,  
this was a very good decision, however, it does have the disadvantage  
that it may run afoul of system file-naming limitations.  Again, I  
think this was a fair trade off.

The questions for us is, how much effort we are willing to make to  
prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot.  I can  
understand why Phillip would like the package index to prevent people  
from choosing problematic package names.

Jim

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