[Distutils] What's missing from easy_install

[Neal Becker]

David Cournapeau wrote:

> Bill Campbell wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>   
>>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>     
>>>> 1. easy_remove!
>>>>
>>>> 2. Various utilities to provide query package management.
>>>>   - easy_install --list (list files installed)
>>>>       
>>>    Implementing is easier said than done, and I think you got that
>>> idea from the lack of response from folks...
>>>     
>>
>> I don't see why this should be all that difficult to implement.
>>   
> 
> In part because different people want different things from the
> packaging, with often conflicting goals. Those conflicts increase pretty
> quickly when you take into account different platforms/type of
> development (desktop apps vs "libraries" vs webapp vs etc...). The
> "cross-platformness" alone, with the underlying philosophical
> differences on how to do deployment  (bundling vs backward compatible
> dependencies, etc...) is quite hard to manage.
> 

The issue I need to address is to cooperate with other packaging systems.  
I'm using Fedora, which is rpm/yum based.  A new python module is announced, 
I'd like to easy_install it.  The official fedora package may be delayed by 
weeks.  So I easy_install.  But when the fedora update comes, they may 
conflict.  For example, scons from fedora will place things in 
/usr/lib/scons, not the same as easy_install.  easy_install will modify 
easy-install.pth.  Nothing will clean it.  So, there is a real need for 
easy_uninstall.