On 23 January 2016 at 08:17, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 11:28 AM, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote:
>> Yea, that’s why I thought about dpkg (system) or system(Debian) or
>> something. The main reason I can think of for preferring “system” is if we
>> don’t want to change the valid characters for a value in this file. Then you
>> can have system(Debian) and system(Conda) and everything will work just
>> fine.
>
> Maybe to simplify the discussion we should just forget about INSTALLER,
> leave it in peace to be what the PEP says ("fyi this is the last program to
> touch this, in case anyone cares"), and add a new file with whatever
> syntax/semantics make sense. Filenames are cheap and plentiful, and no
> reason to complicate this discussion with hypothetical backcompat worries.Right, that was my theory in implementing INSTALLER just as PEP 376 defined it - having pip write "pip" to that file is enough to let us determine: 1. Controlled in a pip-compatible way 2. Controlled in a pip-incompatible way 3. pip compatibility not specified Paul's right that at the time the assumption was each tool would just write *its own* name into the file, but given the other changes that have happened since then, it now makes sense that other tools that are fully interoperable with another more-widely used installer may choose to write that installer's name instead of their own, and the only states we *really* care about from a UX perspective are "definitely compatible", "definitely incompatible" and "don't know". We may decide to do something more sophisticated later, but that would be as part of someone finding the roundtuits to actually design a plugin system for delegating to system package managers when running as root. From a downstream perspective, the main thing we need to know in order to choose a suitable value to put into that file is how pip decides to use whatever we write there. For example, if pip were to emit a warning message looking something like: "<project> is not managed by pip, skipping (use '<INSTALLER content>' or '--force' to update it)" Then the distro could update our packaging policies such that we write our respective package management command names into the INSTALLER files when creating system packages. (As far as the regex defining the permitted content goes, appropriately caveating PEP 376 to better match the reality of how current generation tools work is one of my main motivations for revising the specification process) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
