[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 - setuptools vs Distribute

[K. Richard Pixley]

P.J. Eby wrote:
> At 07:25 AM 10/5/2009 -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote:
>> How do I delete a package using easy_install?
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#uninstalling-packages
That doesn't remove a package.  It simply removes the package from the 
search path by one method in hopes that no further instances of it will 
be loaded.

To actually remove it, you have to know the format of the library, the 
package formats, local library storage conventions, and you need to be 
an expert user of distutils, setuptools, buildout, etc, in order to 
determine the content of the package itself in order to remove it 
manually.  And even then you'd have to manually search your entire 
system for any packages that might still depend on this package lest you 
break them too.

That's far beyond the scope of expectation for a casual package 
maintainer.  That's more akin to current macosx standards, (install 
only), than debian or rpm, (install, update, query, remove, etc).

I suppose it's not such a bad problem if you reload your OS frequently.  
Or solely work with virtualenv or the like so that you can easily 
discard and rebuild an environment whenever you need one.  Of course, 
that doesn't really help with the task of keeping multiple servers 
current or rolling internal software out to an enterprise.

--rich