At 10:07 PM 11/23/2005 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote: >Phillip J. Eby wrote: >>I try to use very long names for options that can have damaging effects >>if used indiscriminately. A project that's installed the "old-fashioned >>way" (which is what this does, apart from adding .egg-info) is hard to >>uninstall and may overwrite other projects' files. So, it is only safe >>to use if the files are being managed by some external package manager, >>and it further only works for a single installed version at a time. So >>the name is intended to advertise these facts, and to discourage people >>who are just reading the option list from trying it out to see what it >>does. :) > >And that is indeed a fine principle. The option would only occur >inside debian/rules (which is the Makefile to build the deb file), >so users would never need to type it manually (except for the DD >creating debian/rules). > >My request would be that the option is stable in its meaning, >e.g. if there is a need to extend/change its semantics, a different >option is introduced (unless it is certain that existing Debian >packages would continue to build correctly under the new meaning).
Since this option exists only to provide a backward-compatible layout for external package managers, I can't see how it would change in terms of layout. I can imagine that across different versions, I might provide a different set of warnings, however. For example, it seems to me I might want to have this option check for existing files prior to installation, and abort if any are found. This seems like a good thing to do since external packaging uses would likely be run against a clean target or put into a temporary directory anyway. I'm also debating whether this option should also require the --record option, since there might otherwise be no way for an external packaging tool to know which files and directories belong to the installed package. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
