I'm not on distutils-sig, but this is probably of little interest to
python-dev. Please Cc: me if you think my continued input would be
useful to this discussion.
On 08:25 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
almost always in the phrase, "please do not use distutils to do a
system install of Twisted, use the specific package for your
platform".
This is a tangent, but why do you give that advice? I typically give
people the opposite advice on how to install Twisted.
The #1 reason:
* distutils does not provide an uninstaller.
This means that a user who has installed a Python library - but
especially a package like Twisted, which uses a shared namespace with
other libraries that use it, twisted.plugins - can't easily get rid of
it. I only ever use 'setup.py' in conjunction with '--prefix'; in my
opinion, the *default* behavior of distutils should be "--prefix
~/.local".
Definitely not the only reason, though. Even if distutils had a great
uninstaller, I still probably wouldn't recommend it...
* distutils will interfere with the system package manager, potentially
breaking it, by writing files to locations reserved for the system
package manager (/usr, et. al.)
* distutils won't uninstall a system-installed version of the package
first, so if you use e.g. --force to overwrite your system files, you
may end up with leftover system packaged (incompatible, earlier-version)
plugins or modules which break your distutils install
* running arbitrary, non-vendor-supported code as root as a matter of
habit is, in my humble opinion, bad; distutils requires you to run as
root for the default behavior to work. the system package manager
typically requires root permission too, but at least it's the sort of
thing which has been audited.
* not only can you not reverse the process, there's no way to *tell* if
distutils has crapped all over your system installation of a particular
package
* setuptools causes seemingly random breakages (in packages which
support it), and I don't want to deal with bug reports from users
related to packaging; packagers are capable of dealing with setuptools'
interactions with the platform and creating a nice, neat bundle that
works as expected.
* when you say "distutils", what do you mean? running 'setup.py' from
some random revision of trunk? doing 'sdist' from trunk, then install?
Using operating-system packages at least suggests that you're using a
release, or if not an actual release, you've gone through something
approximating the actual release/build process that we suggest for
users.
* if the user is installing for development anyway, and not for
deployment, then why bother doing any installation step at all? It's
probably better to just drop an SVN checkout on PYTHONPATH somewhere.
And, finally...
* why bother having installers prepared for particular systems, if they
are not the preferred way of doing things? If and when distutils is
ready to be the thing I will suggest to users, I imagine that we'll stop
having operating system packages. (Of course, that begs the question
why distutils would have commands like "bdist_wininst" - it's difficult
to beat the native packages for convenience.)
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