[Python-Dev] "Absolute" paths in PEP 376 RECORD files

[Nick Coghlan]

David Lyon wrote:
> All it requires is a few word changes to the documentation to tell
> programmers to put your documentation in "docs"...

There is no current distutils setting to indicate that a particular data
file is actually documentation rather than something else - hence such a
thing *isn't* just a matter of updating the documentation. If you're
actually saying that "hey, that metadata shouldn't be in the code, it
should just be a file naming convention" then that *in itself* is a
design decision that needs to be discussed and agreed via a PEP (a
'standard' that nobody follows or has even agreed to follow is a useless
standard).

> If that is going to burn out the existing developers, it might
> suggest that it is time to get some fresh developers onboard....

No, tackling *all* of the distutils issues (supporting uninstallation,
moving from setup.py to static metadata for simple cases, providing more
fine-grained *programmatic* file categorisation, anything else I've
missed) at once would probably burn out anyone that tried to do it.

The coding in all this really isn't that hard. It's the gathering of
feedback, assessment of use cases and the constant balancing act between
retaining enough flexibility to allow for future extensions without a
complete rebuild of the design without making the current design so
complex as to be unusable.

If it was just a matter of throwing some code in the standard library or
some words in the documentation and declaring "this is how it shall be
from now on" it would have been done years ago :P

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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