[Distutils] Parallel installation of incompatible versions

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Bohuslav Kabrda <bkabrda at redhat.com> wrote:
> So what would be done when CherryPy 4 came? CherryPy 3 is installed directly in site-packages, so version 2 and 4 would be treated with split-install?
> It seems to me that this type of special casing is not what we want. If you develop on one machine and deploy on another machine, you have no guarantee that the standard installation of CherryPy is the same as on your system. That would force developers to actually always install their used versions by "split-install", so that they could make sure they always import the correct version.

This approach isn't viable, as it is both backwards incompatible with
the expectations of current Python software and incompatible with the
requirements of Linux distros and other system integrators (who need
to be able to add new backwards incompatible versions of software
without changing the default version).

And I definitely won't shout at people for mentioning what other
languages do - learning from what works and what doesn't for other
groups is exactly what we *should* be doing. Many of the features in
the forthcoming metadata 2.0 specification are driven by stealing
things that are known to work from Node.js, Perl, Ruby, PHP, RPM, DEB,
etc.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia