[Distutils] PEP 376 -- new round

[Tarek Ziadé]

2010/2/5 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> At 01:55 AM 2/5/2010 +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>
>> I think it's still useful, because it points the root packages that
>> can be removed
>> safely without breaking the system -- even if leaving orphaned packages
>> behind.
>>
>> Any opinion ?
>
> I think it's a good idea to have a way to tell what packages were *not*
> installed to satisfy dependencies.
>
> Merely plotting the dependency graph doesn't tell you this, because you
> could have a non-root orphan - i.e., something that was installed to fill a
> dependency, but the depender(s) have now vanished.
>
> I guess what I'm saying is, a thing that is not needed by anything else
> could either be an orphan (due to other uninstalls) *or* a root (manually
> chosen for install), and there is no way to tell them apart just by
> following the graph.

I am wondering *when* the depender(s) may vanish like that, leaving
behind them orphaned dependencies.

I guess this can happen when:

1/ a package (*looks like we can't help it calling a distribution a
package after all...*) is removed by another
   tool that it was installed with.

2/ something goes wrong during uninstallation

So I wonder : will 1/ really happen that often ? and shouldn't 2/ be
taken care by the high-level uninstaller ?

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org