[Pythonmac-SIG] Package Manager idea, adding a URL scheme

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 1 okt 2003, at 21:39, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> On Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003, at 15:33 America/New_York, Ronald Oussoren 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 1 okt 2003, at 21:23, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> That won't work whenever we get around releasing pyobjc-1.0, as 
>>>> "1.0" < "1.0b1" :-(.
>>>
>>> We need to standardize on a way to do this, obviously..  The string 
>>> comparison thing is bad, and the scapegoat has to figure out how to 
>>> find the version for each package (which isn't always possible, 
>>> because not every package includes this metadata).
>>>
>>> There should be a standard sys.version_info way of getting package 
>>> versions.
>>
>> Not necessarily. It would be nice if every package used the same 
>> layout of the version string (maybe the scheme used by python 
>> itself), but the Linux package manager seem to have an pretty 
>> accurate heuristic for comparing versions. Borrowing that heuristic 
>> would also work.
>
> Can you find a reference for this?  I'm not even sure which Linux 
> package manager you're referring to.

I don't have a reference at hand, but I'm pretty sure RPM generally 
"does the right thing" with version numbers. I haven't built linux 
packages for years though, after I switched to Debian on my Linux 
machine I haven't felt the need to built packages.

>
>> BTW. I just noted that PackMan (the GUI) doesn't have an 'uninstall' 
>> option. That makes it harder to throw away packages that are not 
>> really needed.
>
> You would either need to keep receipts, or the scapegoat would have to 
> maintain an "uninstall program" for each package.  Receipts is 
> probably the way to go here, and that would at least partially solve 
> the version-number-string problem (because the scapegoat wouldn't 
> necessarily have to maintain a version checker for each package, but 
> that would be incompatible with packages that the user installed 
> themselves unless distutils was modified to support receipts).

I don't see how receipts would help with the version-number problem, 
other than making it easier to find a version number. Distutils also 
creates a PKG-INFO file in the source-distribution, that's an easy 
source for information about packages (to bad this isn't installed when 
you install a package).

I don't think that adding receipts to PackMan would be usefull, unless 
the end-goal is pushing that code into distutils/the python core.

Ronald