[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 05:05:08PM -0500, Joe Smith wrote:

> I don't like the idea of bdist_deb very much.
> The idea behind the debian packaging system is that unlike with RPM and 
> Windows, package management should be clean.

The idea behind RPM is also that package management should be clean. Debian
packages, on average, do a better job, and 'dpkg' deals a bit more flexibly
with overwritten files and such, but it's not that big a difference.

> The Debian style system attempts to overcome these deficiencies, and
> generally does a decent job with it. The problem is that this can really
> only work if packages are well maintained, and adhere to a set of policies
> that help to further mitigate these problems. Making it easy to generate
> .debs of python modules will likely result in a noticable increase in the
> number of .debs that do not target a specific distribution and/or do not
> follow the policies of that distribution.

That sounds like "oh no, what if the user presses the wrong button". Users
can already mess up the system if they do the wrong thing. Distutils offers
a simple, generic way of saying 'install this' while letting distutils
figure out most of the details. bdist_deb can then put it all in
debian-specific locations, in the debian-preferred way, while registering
all the files so they get deleted properly on deinstall. Things get more
complicated when you have pre-/post-install/remove scripts, but those are
pretty rare for the average Python packages, and since they would (in the
Python package) most likely run from setup.py, those would break at
bdist-time, not deb-install-time.

It's not easier for bdist-deb created .deb's to break things than it is for
arbitrary developer-built .deb's to do so, and it's quite a bit easier for
'setup.py install' to break things. At least a .deb can be easily removed.
And the alternative to bdist_deb is in many cases 'setup.py install'.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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