[Distutils] PEP 376, the INSTALLER file, and system packages

[Paul Moore]

On 22 January 2016 at 18:10, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> The benefit of doing this, is that with a special value in that file that says
> "this file belongs to the OS", then pip could start looking for that file and
> require a --force flag before it modifies any files belonging to that project.
> Then distributors like Debian, Fedora, etc could simply write out the INSTALLER
> file with the correct value, and pip would start to respect their files by
> default.
>
> Thoughts? Does this sound reasonable to everyone? Do we think it needs a new
> PEP or can we just amend PEP 376 to add this extra bit of information?

Using "system" as the name of the "installer" sounds like it conforms
pretty well to PEP 376 as it stands.
Paul