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

[Paul Moore]

On 22 January 2016 at 20:45, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Hmm, in my head the three cases were more like:
>
> 1) The installed project is managed by a Python level tool which uses the Python metadata as it’s database. Thus if you’re this kind of tool too, then you can muck around here because things will be fine.
> 2) The installed project is managed by something that isn’t a Python level tool, and it has it’s own database and the .(egg|dist)-info files are not understood by it.
> 3) We don’t know what is managing the project.
>
> The first would be things like, pip, easy_install, and distil. These can all easily interopt with each other because they’re all going to lay down .egg-info or .dist-info files and read those same files. The second is things like Conda, dpkg, yum, etc which are going to treat .egg-info or .dist-info files as just another opaque file that is included in it’s package that it has to lay down.

Good point - maybe that's how it *should* have been. My recollection
of the discussions at the time was "put your tool name in here" and
nobody really thought about the possibility of more than one tool
co-operating. This was in the bad old days of "my tool is better than
yours" flamewars :-(

Switching to something like that model probably does need a PEP. But
INSTALLER doesn't seem the right concept for that - it's more like
wanting a file that defines how the project metadata is stored -
"Metadata 2.0" or "OS" or "Conda" or whatever.

Paul