[Distutils] Some negative press for easy_install

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:10 PM 2/9/2006 -0600, Robert Kern wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > At 01:31 PM 2/9/2006 -0600, Robert Kern wrote:
> >
> >> Andrew Straw wrote:
> >>
> >> > Note that matplotlib tried essentially this for a while, but apparently
> >> > some folks really didn't like it. I'm not sure what exactly broke on
> >> > their systems (they didn't complain to the mailing list), but when
> >> > setup.py reverted to a plain distutils script, they cheered.
> >>
> >> That's right, they complained to me, instead.  :-)
> >>
> >> The issue was that they had setuptools on their system because they were
> >> building eggs for another project, but specifically *didn't* want to
> >> install
> >> matplotlib as an egg.
> >
> > setuptools-based packages can be forced to install the old-fashioned way
> > using:
> >
> >     setup.py install --single-version-externally-managed
> >
> > as long as you also specify a --root directory or a --record file.  This
> > is of course not upgradeable or uninstallable without help from a
> > packaging tool that can utilize the results of --root or --record.
>
>And this particular user did not want that, either.

I'm confused.  They didn't want to be able to uninstall?  Didn't want to 
point --record to /dev/null, or --root to /?  Or something else?