[Distutils] Install time prefixes and data files

[Wolodja Wentland]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 21:36 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:

> Yes. Imagine that I create a library, which includes a firefox plugin
> in python. I need to differentiate between what will end up in firefox
> and the rest.

One thing I find noteworthy/horrifying about your *Firefox* plugin
example is that this would mean that pip would have to install files in
a directory completely unrelated to Python and one that is under the
control of the package manager of the system.

I guess a lot of distribution maintainers would curse the distutils
developers if this becomes common practice for a lot of python packages.

But this is more related to the fact that Python provides a second
package manager that is *distinct* from the system one. It might be a
good idea to display a big WARNING whenever somebody tries to install
distributions (-> python, who came up with this terminology) within a
path that is usually handled by the systems package manager.

This would mean that the *default* install should be PEP 370 compliant
or inside a virtualenv and that installing into system paths should be
enabled explicitly.

BTW - How are uninstalls of distributions (python) handled on which
other distributions depend. Will all rdepends also be uninstalled?

-- 
  .''`.     Wolodja Wentland    <wentland at cl.uni-heidelberg.de> 
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