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

[Bob Ippolito]

On Friday, Oct 3, 2003, at 12:26 America/New_York, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> While I personally think Jack's approach is the best from a 
> functionality point of view, I do agree with Just's position and I 
> think we should not be storing any Python executable code into the 
> plist files, version checking or otherwise. Doing things like running 
> setup.py should take place within package manager, using the plist 
> files to determine where said file is, etc.
> I think this is bad from a security perspective and like wxPython 
> we've seen that module conflicts could occur.
>
> I think the solution to both Just and Jack's problems is to have a 
> standard way in Python to store a version number that is NOT inside a 
> Python code file. PKG-INFO springs to mind. Now, it doesn't solve our 
> immediate problem re: dependencies but remember, we're designing 
> software that is not even known by most of the Python community at 
> this point. Once it is better known (I agree with Jack about the PEP), 
> and people know that writing a simple PKG-INFO file and placing it in 
> the root of their module will cause it to work well with 
> PackageManager, they will start doing this. It also means we can take 
> advantage of PKG-INFO even when PM didn't install the package.

This would need to happen with distutils, I think this is a great idea, 
but I have some additions:
1 - not everything goes into a unique package, not everything is in a 
package at all, so the names of the PKG-INFO files would have to be 
mangled somehow or put into some hierarchy to make it unique
2 - we should also include installation receipts (both for source and 
binary installs) because we ought to if we're already modifying 
distutils.  this would be something that is embedded in the PKG-INFO, 
is along side the PKG-INFO in a "receipt bundle" or something of that 
sort.
3 - while we're at it we should standardize a way to do binary 
installation of example scripts and non-in-the-code documentation

-bob