On 4 January 2013 09:37, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com> wrote: > I've never really understood the idea that mere installation of a > distribution should need to write to completely arbitrary locations on > the filesystem. Personally, if the software in my distribution needs > things to be put in places that aren't circumscribed by the install > machinery (console scripts are an example of things that *are* > circumscribed by the install machinery) I'll ship the distribution with > a script (often a console script) that people can run that does the > needful, but this never runs during installation.
I agree - on Windows, I would generally consider a package that installed anything outside of the Python installation to be pretty much broken (it wouldn't work properly in a virtualenv, for example). The problem seems to be that Unix/Linux packaging experts seem to have differing views (in particular around FHS-related concerns). I don't understand these issues well enough to comment, other than to say that even among the Unix community there does not seem to be consensus that there is a need for installation to write outside of site-packages. I do - very occasionally - take a Python installation and move it (for example onto a pen drive). It's no longer a "properly installed" Python, agreed, but for pretty much all practical purposes it still works and I wouldn't like to see that change as a result of absolute paths being mandated in a standard. I'm -1 on absolute paths. Sure, there's an issue with installing files no locations outside the Python installation, but I'd suggest (1) deprecating such usage, and (2) using absolute paths there. An install-time warning might be useful, if it's easy to do. Vinay - does your analysis of PyPI give any indication of what proportion of packages actually use the ability to install to arbitrary locations? I.e., how much of a real world issue is this? Paul. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
