[Distutils] pip vs easy_install vs distutils2

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 3 Jun, 2010, at 10:38, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
> [..]
>> A full switch to PEP 376.  An option to enable/disable would just be confusing, any option increases the mental load of developers (and anyone that just wants to install a python package to use its functionality) and in this case I don't think adding an option would be worth that.
>> 
>> This would break current releases of tools that use the current "egg-info" information due to the different filesystem name (currently .egg-info, .dist-info in PEP 376), but those tools will have to be updated sometime anyway.
> 
> I don't see what would be the advantage, since we are adding in
> pkgutil APIs (PEP 376 implementation) the ability to read old formats
> as well, to make it easier to query what's installed. Plus, distutils
> was marked "frozen" to avoid instability (any change in distutils
> potentially breaks tools out there, even internal changes).

The RECORD file in PEP 376 enables scripted removal of a distribution, which cannot be done without PEP 376 unless the user that installed the distribution was careful enough to use either the --record option or a tool like pip. 

I agree that the fragility of distutils is a problem, which would making changing it this far along the 2.7 release process rather dangerous.

Ronald

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