[Distutils] Some clarifications and/or corrections to PEP 376

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Sep 6 23:33:53 CEST 2012


On 6 September 2012 22:18, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> I prefer that paths in record are always relative to the parent directory of
> record (usually site-packages) unless a relative path would not work (drive
> letter boundaries). Consider installing and then chroot.

That's a much simpler rule and I agree in principle that it's
preferable. The problems are:

1. It's much further away from what PEP 376 specifies. I will accept
this happily if there is general agreement that it's OK, but I
preferred to start with a more conservative suggestion :-)
2. Do you really want long strings of ../../.. if a distribution
specifies a file to be installed in an absolute location (possible,
although probably not well supported by current tools). Consider a
package that installs something to /var/python (I'm not a Unix user,
so this may be an unconvincing example, but I understand that similar
things *are* possible). If Python is in /usr, you'd have RECORD with
something like ../../../../var/python. I don't have enough Unix
experience to know if anyone would care about this. Of course what I
know about chroot implies this would break in that scenario anyway...

As I say, if the Unix people are OK with it, I'm happy to go this way.

Of course, I'd be happy to mandate that files in a distribution should
never be installed anywhere that isn't defined as one of the sysconfig
defined paths - but suggesting that would be sure to start a much
bigger debate that I don't want to get into as I don't have the
expertise to referee it.

Paul.


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