[Distutils] PEP 376 for Distutils

[P.J. Eby]

At 04:45 PM 2/24/2009 +0100, Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>What about another interoperability hook for system packages: specify
>a file that a (system) package manager can include into the egg-info
>directory (or egg-file) to tell setuptools/pip that this egg is
>managed by the system and hence shouldn't be removed by setuptools/pip.
>
>Which such a file the user of python package tool could be warned if
>he tries to uninstall an egg that's owned by the system, instead of
>invoking the wrath of a sysadmin by removing such files.

The absence of a RECORD file could suffice for that, I think.  Any 
file that isn't positively listed in *exactly* one RECORD file 
shouldn't be removed.

I'm not super-set on that position, just noting that the absence of a 
listing is sufficient to detect something that "shouldn't" (as 
opposed to "mustn't") be deleted.  The only contradicting use case is 
the deletion of packages that were installed via an older distutils version.