[Distutils] tracking requested vs dependency installs in PEP 376 metadata

Gediminas Paulauskas menesis at pov.lt
Fri Oct 9 11:10:28 CEST 2009


2009/10/8 Carl Meyer <carl at meyerloewen.net>:
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> Gediminas Paulauskas wrote:
>> Debian's Apt has this capability, see
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackageDependencyManagement . It keeps a
>> separate file to track the manually installed packages, and the flag
>> is named "Auto-Installed". REQUIRED is an ambiguous name -- is it
>> required by other packages, or wanted by user for any reason (and that
>> is the case)?
>
> I agree that the name is not ideal. Perhaps naming the file
> AUTO_INSTALLED, and flipping the semantics (so the presence of the file
> allows it to be considered orphaned) would be better.

For backwards compatibility already installed packages have to be
treated as manually installed, because it is not known why they were
installed. So the presence of a new file or flag has to signify that
it was AUTO_INSTALLED, i.e. the other way around than originally
suggested.

Gediminas


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