[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Josselin Mouette]

Le mardi 22 novembre 2005 à 18:47 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> I don't understand you here.  Are you saying that it's not possible for 
> dpkg to do a post-install or uninstall operation like adding or removing a 
> line from a file?

It's possible, but it's fragile.

> Of course, this creates additional work for package maintainers that 
> wouldn't be present with setuptools' normal .egg file/directory 
> distributions, and my assumption was that the maintainers would prefer to 
> be able to ignore such issues and get the benefit of dependencies defined 
> by the upstream developers.

Debian is used to ignore dependencies defined by upstream developers,
because in most cases they turn out to be unsuitable. That's why there's
no tool to convert libtool versioning schemes to shlibs files, why
there's no tool to convert configure.in requirements to
build-dependencies, and why there's currently no tool to generate
dependencies for python packages at all. The maintainer of each package
is on his own to define dependencies, because he knows better.

> Eggs keep each project in its own little 
> bubble, where it can't overwrite anything else and can be uninstalled 
> without removing any overlapping parts.

I can't believe you are pushing a solution with such a "feature".
Duplication is something we should avoid at all costs.
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
   `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom