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

[Paul Moore]

On 18 April 2015 at 18:19, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
<chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

(your quote trimming's a bit over-enthusiastic, you lost the attribution here)

>> "python -m something" rather than just "something" isn't broken, it's
>> just an inconvenience.
>
> Tell that to a newbie. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that should
> "just work".

It's a huge "quality of implementation" issue, certainly - any
installer that doesn't include script generation built in is going to
be as annoying as hell to a user. But they do exist (wheel install,
for instance) and the resulting installation "works", even if a
newcomer would hate it. So it's not "mandatory" in the sense that no
functionality is lost. But this is a moot point, as PEP 459 says the
python.commands extension SHOULD be marked as required. And wheel
install would technically be in violation of PEP 426, as it doesn't
handle script wrappers and it doesn't fail when a package needs them
(only "technically", because PEP 426 isn't finalised yet, and "wheel
install" could be updated to support it).

But I'd already said most of that - you just pulled that one point out
of context.

Paul