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

[PJ Eby]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:17 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> The other thing is that using *only* relative paths doesn't cut it - there are circumstances where you write files outside site-packages, so you would need absolute paths for those files (or incredibly convoluted relative ones),

Actually, we already have a mechanism for that - IIRC, PEP 376 defines
various system-managed file categories.  So if you specify e.g. that
something is a Powershell script, then the installation database
should record a path relative to the "powershell root", which is
defined elsewhere.

> and that wouldn't work well in the OSAF scenario you described, anyway.

Actually, it'd work fine in the case where script paths are relative
to "the directory where scripts go", when that directory is determined
by the Python instance doing the looking/installing/repairing.

Anyway, the point was that there's more than one reason to want
relative paths, and as long as they can be relative to things besides
the location of the library itself, the other cases can be taken care
of.  (The OSAF example is also a reason to want the paths to always be
/-separated, even on Windows.)