[Distutils] RFC : PEP 376 - egg.info

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 5:08 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at preisshare.net> wrote:
> A typical user just wants to install package x,y and z from
> pypi. They want them to go "into python" and it is as simple
> as that. Those packages will probably end up in site-packages
> but as likely as not, the user won't care where they go as
> long as they are available when they are needed.
>
> When they are finished, or they don't like them.. they want
> to deinstall them by clicking the remove button.
>
> In what I am doing, the nested directories would have been
> happily removed.
>

What is your definition of a "package" and a "project" ?

If by "package" you mean the packages that are available at PyPI
for instance, they may have several packages included in them.

If you use easy_install, they will stay nested in the same directory
or zip file in your site-packages, but you still may have some
files created outside.

for instance, a console script generated by setuptools console_script
entry point.

In your case, you may find everything needed to uninstall though, by
looking inside
the EGG-INFO directory of the project.

Now back to the initial discussion : if some projects are not
installed with easy_install
you won't have all the info needed to uninstall the various packages
and scripts.

So basically: we are trying to add in Distutils such a standard, (it
differs slighlty from
setuptools but it's the same spirit)

And then, as we said earlier, it will be impossible to uninstall packages that
were previously uninstalled with some other techniques since we won't have
the info required.

You said it yourself : your own uninstall system works only for
packages installed with easy_install,
so I guess you agree that your system cannot uninstall other packages properly

(I show you an example of a package you couldn't uninstall in my previous mail.)

Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org