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

[Daniel Holth]

On Sep 6, 2012 5:33 PM, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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...

Fyi in pip all the installed - files paths are relative to
installed-files.txt itself - even more dots.

> 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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