On 18 April 2015 at 20:02, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It's a huge "quality of implementation" issue, certainly - any >> installer that doesn't include script generation built in is going to >> be as annoying as hell to a user. But they do exist (wheel install, >> for instance) and the resulting installation "works", even if a >> newcomer would hate it. So it's not "mandatory" in the sense that no >> functionality is lost. But this is a moot point, as PEP 459 says the >> python.commands extension SHOULD be marked as required. And wheel >> install would technically be in violation of PEP 426, as it doesn't >> handle script wrappers and it doesn't fail when a package needs them >> (only "technically", because PEP 426 isn't finalised yet, and "wheel >> install" could be updated to support it). > > It's not in violation, that's the whole point of saying SHOULD, rather > than MUST. Please don't lose that distinction - if users start > demanding that developers always implement SHOULDs, they're misreading > the spec, and are going to make life miserable for a lot of people by > making unreasonable demands on their time. > > As a specification author, "SHOULD" is a way for us to say "most users > are likely to want this, so you should probably do it if you don't > have a strong preference, but not all users will want it, so certain > tools may choose not to do it for reasons that are too context > specific for us to go into in a general purpose specification". > > The MUSTs are the "things you may not personally care about, but other > people do care about, will break if you get this wrong" part of the > specs, the SHOULDs are "this is probably a good thing to do, but you > may disagree" :)
Sorry - I missed quoting one relevant bit of PEP 426. What I was trying to say was that wheel install violates the "MUST" in PEP 426 (that installers MUST support a required extension or report an error when installing). But Daniel pointed out that I'm wrong anyway - wheel install *does* support generating script wrappers, using setuptools to do so. My apologies for not checking my facts more carefully, and for my confusing wording. Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
