[Distutils] PEP 376, Uninstallation and interoperability

[PJ Eby]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 7:08 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The main problem I can see is with namespace packages: you could get a
> "Do you want to delete this directory?" every time you uninstalled a
> distribution that contributed files to a namespace package.

Actually, the idea of PEP 376 is that an uninstaller tool must read
the records of *all* packages, not just the one it's trying to
uninstall.  Thus, it knows the difference between files that belong to
an installed distribution, and "noise".  It would thus have no reason
to ask to delete a directory that still contains pieces of another
distribution.