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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Carl Meyer <carl at dirtcircle.com> wrote:
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> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>> With proposal of tracking which packages are installed as a dependency
>> of other packages and automaticly uninstalling them when the package
>> that depends on them gets uninstalled
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> Allow me to note (again) that the current proposal is ONLY part A
> (tracking). Part B ("automatically uninstalling...") is left completely
> unspecified, and would depend on what uninstaller tools choose to do
> with this metadata. I am NOT proposing that the basic uninstall function
> built in to distutils would automatically remove orphans.

PEP 376 doesn't want to go that far anyway. The uninstall API is just
a reference
API that can be used to remove *one* distribution. So if there's a
tracking file,
it should be the simplest thing possible.

The goal of PEP 376 is to provide tools for installers/uninstallers to
work with a site-package directory,
not a full featured uninstaller.

I am starting to think when reading back this whole thread, that
there's a missing API:
a way to read and write arbitrary files in the egg-info directory of
an installed distribution.

This would allow third-party tools to have their own extra metadata
information regarding
the distributions.

That is, IIRC, what Jim proposed a while ago when he said that we
should have a way
to define arbitrary metadata for distributions.

Tarek.