[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??
Phillip J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Nov 24 00:12:11 CET 2005
At 10:07 PM 11/23/2005 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>I try to use very long names for options that can have damaging effects
>>if used indiscriminately. A project that's installed the "old-fashioned
>>way" (which is what this does, apart from adding .egg-info) is hard to
>>uninstall and may overwrite other projects' files. So, it is only safe
>>to use if the files are being managed by some external package manager,
>>and it further only works for a single installed version at a time. So
>>the name is intended to advertise these facts, and to discourage people
>>who are just reading the option list from trying it out to see what it
>>does. :)
>
>And that is indeed a fine principle. The option would only occur
>inside debian/rules (which is the Makefile to build the deb file),
>so users would never need to type it manually (except for the DD
>creating debian/rules).
>
>My request would be that the option is stable in its meaning,
>e.g. if there is a need to extend/change its semantics, a different
>option is introduced (unless it is certain that existing Debian
>packages would continue to build correctly under the new meaning).
Since this option exists only to provide a backward-compatible layout for
external package managers, I can't see how it would change in terms of
layout. I can imagine that across different versions, I might provide a
different set of warnings, however. For example, it seems to me I might
want to have this option check for existing files prior to installation,
and abort if any are found. This seems like a good thing to do since
external packaging uses would likely be run against a clean target or put
into a temporary directory anyway.
I'm also debating whether this option should also require the --record
option, since there might otherwise be no way for an external packaging
tool to know which files and directories belong to the installed package.
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