[Distutils] Finding dependencies and Limiting download

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:37 PM 3/16/2006 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
>Another solution is at the package level -- RPMs can overwrite each 
>other's files, if they are spec'd out to do that somehow.  This is not 
>very clean -- I don't know which if any package is allowed to ultimately 
>delete that file.  With some post-install hooks you could just create the 
>file, and delete when there's nothing left in the package.  This would 
>have to be handled for every packaging system.  But there's only a couple 
>anyone uses.

Er, define "couple" and "anyone".  :)  I've heard from folks using Gentoo, 
RPM, .deb, and win32.exe just to start with.  And let's not forget the 
people doing darwinports and other BSD systems.  And that's all only 
talking about packaging systems that have existing users wrapping 
setuptools and setuptools-based packages, not general Python-using systems!

So it's a bit more than a couple.  And I suspect that most, if not all, 
would just as soon that "setup.py install --root" should "just work" 
without having to change their build processes, and my proposed solution 
would ensure that.

Indeed, I believe that this fix for namespace packages is probably the last 
remaining impediment to setuptools' ability to achieve Total World 
Domination, except for the introduction of .egg-info files in Python 
2.5.  As far as I can tell, these are the only things left before system 
packages and user packages can all "just get along".