[Distutils] PEP 376 -- support for release versions?

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 11:45:47PM +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Sridhar Ratnakumar
> <sridharr at activestate.com> wrote:
> [..]
> >
> > Since release numbers are specific to the installer (and repository), how
> > about having it in the .egg-info/INSTALLER file?
> >
> > $ cat .egg-info/INSTALLER
> > name: PyPM
> >
> > [package]
> > release: 2
> > url: http://pypm.activestate.com/..../python-ldap....pypm
> > pinned: True
> > ...
> 
> We specified an INSTALLER file already, see:
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0376/#id33
> 
> But just with the name of the installer. The use case was to be able
> to avoid removing a distribution
> that was installed by another installer.
> 
> I don't think the extra bit ([package]) is necessary in the INSTALLER
> file, because it's specific to the installer tool.
> And, as long as you can read/write arbitrary files in /.egg-info, you
> can put it in a specific file.

It seems a bad idea to put this extra info in a distutils standard,
the binary release version have been managed outside of distutils for
a long time and it works perfect.

Allowing an arbitrary file to to be read via the egg-metadata API
seems a much better solution, then any packager using that facility
can completely decide what format to use and freely encode more
information without hiting new distutils limitations (like your
pinning).  Of course there's nothing wrong with pypm keeping it's
sqlite db for it's own data either, other binary package managers keep
that info outside too.

Regards
Floris

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