[Distutils] Package DB: strawman PEP

[Mats Wichmann]

At 02:33 PM 7/9/2001 -0400, Mark W. Alexander wrote:
 >On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Andrew Kuchling wrote:
 >
 >> It seems time to bite the bullet and actually begin designing and
 >> implementing a database of installed packages.  As a strawman to get a
 >> focused discussion started, here's a draft of a PEP, with lots of
 >> XXX's in it.  Followups to the Distutils SIG, please.
 >
 >I'm confused. Why? What does this give us that native package managers
 >don't. How is it going to keep synchronized with package manager?

One problem is that native package managers don't make sense for
everything.  I can't imagine wanting to even deal with many of
the package managers out there for a smaller Python package. I'm
not even convinced that one of the major entrants out there - the
Windows one - does a reasonable job with dependencies, but I'm
pretty ignorant there.  And even small packages - a few Python source
files - might want to check for prereqs.