[Distutils] PEP 345, PEP 376, PEP 386

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 4 Jun, 2009, at 5:54, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

> Paul
>> I'd say that it's distutils' responsibility not to offer to uninstall
>> anything it didn't install.
>
> Brian
>> Yep. Though I think that nowdays dpkg installs to a different  
>> directory than
>> Distutils' default. So users have to specify extra options to break
>> their systems.
>
> But how does those third-party install the projects ?
>
> Don't they use Distutils' install command under the hood ?
>
> If so, the new PEP 376 APIs are ignoring previous versions of
> egg-infos and work only with the ones that complies with the new
> standard (it's a quick control right now,  look at the "is_egg_info"
> API in http://bitbucket.org/tarek/pep376/src/tip/pkgutil.py)
>
> So, in any case the uninstall command will not work with project that
> are filtered out by is_egg_info().
>
> So maybe we could add a "INSTALLER" file with a unique md5 key
> provided by the project that installed the package,
> and ask for the key when calling this API ? If not provided, it would
> use Distutils's md5 key

Why should the the INSTALLER file contain a md5 value? I'd use either  
the name of the packager (dpkg,rpm,...), or even that plus the name of  
the external package:

	rpm,py26-zlib

This would make it possible for a PEP376-based uninstaller to give  
more meaningful error messages when you try to uninstall a project  
that was installed by a system package. That is, it could say "this  
project was installed using the 'py26-zlib' system-package, use 'rpm'  
to uninstall" rather than "go away I didn't install this".

BTW. I'd say that the INSTALLER should default to "distutils", that  
is: don't install the INSTALLER file unless someone explicitly asks  
for it by specifying a different value for the installer. A tool like  
bdist_rpm could of course automaticly set that different value.

Ronald
>
>
> Tarek
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