[Distutils] elements of setuptools/wheel/FHS file categories proposal

[Daniel Holth]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> From: Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com>
>
>
>
>> pkg_resources without declaring that dependency. That is why I
>> proposed writing the install paths to an importable file in the
>> package's namespace on request without a new API. This would also
>
>
> Not sure what you mean by this, but I hope by "importable" you don't mean Python source. JSON sounds like a better option. We currently write all the installed files as a simple text file (RECORD), but there's no reason it couldn't be a JSON file which held the mappings of category -> path used during installation, as well as the list of files installed. When you say "package's namespace", are you referring to the .dist-info directory, or something else? Those two words are fraught with ambiguity.

I had suggested writing the mapping next to one of the package's
installed .py files, but it sounds like all other commenters would
prefer a JSON file inside the .dist-info directory.

I would prefer to keep the RECORD manifest of all installed files plus
hashes separate from the e.g. .dist-info/install_scheme.json, it
should not be necessary to parse the former just to figure out where
the config directory is.