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

[Paul Moore]

On 20 April 2015 at 20:44, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 20 April 2015 at 20:27, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>> a default mapping specifying the publisher's preference
>>
>> I didn't think the project author got to specify a preference. All
>> they say is what categories various files go into, and it's the
>> *installer* that maps them to locations.
>> Paul
>
> If an application relied on relative paths from the root of a
> category, then it would probably include the same folder structure in
> its development checkout; setup.py would say "copy ./data into
> $datadir", modulo ignore patterns; it would be convenient if the
> mechanism pointing to $datadir pointed to ./data.

Hmm, I'm clearly struggling to understand what you're trying to cover
with the PEP. I don't think it's particularly productive for me to
keep asking confused questions. I'll wait for the next draft of the
PEP to be published, to see if it clarifies things for me, rather than
continually asking the same sorts of question over and over.

But can I ask that PEP 491 be recast as specifically justifying and
documenting the *changes* to the wheel spec, and how installers will
need to change to address these. The current form of the PEP, as an
updated version of the full wheel spec, is far too difficult to
understand (having to spot the changes by in effect doing a mental
diff between the two PEPs is a big problem, as is the lack of any
obvious place to document *why* the changes have been made). This ties
in with Nick's proposal to hold specs externally, and make PEPs into
proposals for changes to the specs, rather than specs themselves.

Paul