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

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 11 Oct, 2009, at 16:27, Lennart Regebro wrote:

> 2009/10/11 Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com>:
>> What about packages that are installed as a dependency of some  
>> other package
>> and then used in user scripts without an explict depency on them?
>>
>> That is, I install "SuperWebFramework==1.0" which happens to depend  
>> on
>> peak-rules. I later start using peak-rules in my own simple scripts  
>> (without
>> a setup.py or other explicit dependency information), and yet later  
>> decide
>> to uninstall "SuperWebFramework".  If I understand the proposal  
>> correctly
>> the uninstallation of "SuperWebFrameWork" would break my scripts.
>
> Yes of course.

IMHO that is a bad experience for the user, because it is very  
unintuitive that I have to explicitly install something that's already  
installed to ensure that it doesn't go away in the future. This might  
work in a serious development environment, but can end up to be very  
annoying and confusing for casual users.

Ronald
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