[Distutils] Uninstall command, the return

[David Cournapeau]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 23:21, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
>   
>> Many other people, however, are unwilling to let the Python packaging tool
>> nor the packages that it is installing write into their system directories.
>>  For these people, the system directories are never allowed to be written
>> into by any tool other than their operating system packaging tool e.g. apt.
>>  For these people, offering a new feature so that, in addition to the Python
>> packaging tool scribbling into their system directory at install time, it
>> will *also* later scribble into it again attempting to undo the changes that
>> it earlier did is only compounding the problem.  :-)
>>
>> For those people, there are several potential solutions.  One is the path
>> from Python package through Python packaging tool (e.g. stdeb) to operating
>> system package (e.g. .deb) to operating system tool (e.g. apt) to system
>> directories.  Another is GNU stow.
>>
>> For me, and for some hackers that I've talked to, making setuptools
>> compatible with GNU stow would satisfy their need to have a way to cleanly
>> uninstall.
>>
>> So, please consider this a reminder in the distutils development process
>> that you are undergoing that GNU stow compatibility has many benefits.
>>     
>
> As far as I can figure out, that's just a matter of installing things
> with a prefix, like /usr/local/stow/yoursoftware instead of /usr/local
> and then using stow to symlink everything into /usr/local/bin and
> /usr/local/lib, etc. I may have misunderstood, though, but if not it
> should already be compatible...
>   

There are two problems with stow and setuptools:
    - setuptools refuses to install in a directory not in PYTHONPATH, so
python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local/stow/my-package does not
work when setup.py uses setuptools. You have to use
--single-version-externally-managed (plus another option required by
this one). That's the most annoying point, since it depends on whether
setup.py uses setuptools or plain distutils. From a user POV, setuptools
broke standard python behavior.
    - namespace packages: the fact that namespace/__init__ are 'owned'
by several packages is a fundamental problem (not only for stow, but
almost any package system). But unless python itself supports namespace
packages, I don't see any solution to this one.

cheers,

Davod