[Distutils] PEP 376 Status

[Ian Bicking]

After reading through the PEP, one thing that I'd like to see is the use of
relative filenames in RECORD.  I've used this functionality myself with pip
and Silver Lining, where I am transferring code (in its installed form)
between systems; so long as you stick to pure-Python code and have relative
filenames (as pip uses, and with some fixups of .pth files) this works
well.  Systems like App Engine also encourage this kind of behavior.
Uninstall actually becomes more interesting to me as well in this model, as
I have these packages installed for a much longer amount of time (I'm not
simply reinstalling everything on new computers).

After a bit of IRC discussion, it seems like files that are outside of
sys.prefix should not be relative (e.g., a file installed in /etc shouldn't
be ../../../../etc/package/some-file), but anything inside sys.prefix can be
relative.  This would work well with virtualenv, for instance (where most
everything is under sys.prefix, and relative files work nicely for all those
cases).

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org  |  http://twitter.com/ianbicking
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