[Distutils] Beyond wheels 1.0: helping downstream, FHS and more

[Robert Collins]

On 14 April 2015 at 09:35, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
...

One of the earlier things mentioned here - {pre,post}{install,remove}
scripts - raises a red flag for me.

In Debian at least, the underlying system has the ability to run such
turing complete scripts, and they are a rich source of bugs - both
correctness and performance related.

Nowadays nearly all such scripts are machine generated from higher
level representations such as 'this should be the default command' or
'configure X if Y is installed', but because the plumbing is turing
complete, they all need to be executed, which slows down
install/upgrade paths, and any improvement to the tooling requires a
version bump on *all* the packages using it - because effectively the
package is itself a compiled artifact.

I'd really prefer it if we keep wheels 100% declarative, and instead
focus on defining appropriate metadata for the things you need to
accomplish {pre,post}{install,remove} of a package.

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud