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

[Vinay Sajip]

From: Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com>



> orthogonality. If you want to argue it's equally fast, tell me that
> it's equally fast on a 1st gen Raspberry Pi, not on an 8-core Zeon.

No point arguing either way on performance or memory usage without measurements :-)

Backward compatibility seems easy enough to cater for by using a name other than RECORD. For some value of "easy enough", obviously. Obviously we have to consider backward compatibility any way, since existing installations wouldn't have the category mapping in any form.

> Most importantly the RECORD just has nothing to do with the paths to
> each file category, and it doesn't even exist in a development
> checkout which has not been installed.

In a development checkout, there would presumably be no "this mapping of categories to paths was used for installation" either. There would seem to be at least two such mappings, anyway - a default mapping specifying the publisher's preference, which might live in PEP 426 source metadata, and a logically separate mapping written to .dist-info which might be different, depending on how the installer was invoked (e.g. with command line overrides specified by a user at installation time).

Regards,

Vinay Sajip