#16671: 5th tutorial on turning Polls into a reusable app
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Reporter: stumbles | Owner: ben@…
Type: New feature | Status: new
Component: Documentation | Version: master
Severity: Normal | Resolution:
Keywords: | Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: 1 | Needs documentation: 0
Needs tests: 0 | Patch needs improvement: 0
Easy pickings: 0 | UI/UX: 0
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Comment (by carljm):
Agreed, this is looking great.
I don't have clarity on how best to both keep it simple and recommend best
practices in the morass of confusion that is Python packaging, when it
comes to recommending distutils vs distribute. You can't really recommend
distribute without explaining that it's a third-party package, not part of
the Python standard library, meaning that you're preventing people who
don't have it from installing your package - but at the same time, in
practice everybody has it, so that's not really a problem. But that's an
awful lot of extra potentially-very-confusing information to try to
squeeze in (not to mention explaining _why_ you'd use distribute rather
than the stdlib option), all of which argues for just using distutils.
The main problem I see is in recommending distutils and recommending
"python setup.py install" in the same tutorial - because that's the one
path that means no useful metadata is installed along with the package,
and therefore automated uninstall is not possible (pip is not able to
uninstall packages installed in this way). When you add in "sudo", it
means our tutorial is telling people to install a test package as the root
user, to their system site-packages, in such a way that it can't be
removed without manually sudoing and using "rm -rf". That's...
unfortunate. We have three choices (use distutils, demonstrate "python
setup.py install", default to "sudo" rather than virtualenv) which I think
are all individually the right choice for simplicity's sake, but the
combination has a sub-optimal result. If we had to change any of those
three, I'd probably go for switching from distutils to distribute.
Regardless, if the tutorial tells them to "sudo python setup.py install",
I think we need to tell them how they can uninstall it. If we use
distribute, we can just link to pip and say "pip can uninstall this." If
we stick with distutils, we have to tell them they'd need to manually
"sudo rm -rf" the polls directory (which they can find as demonstrated, by
importing polls and checking `polls.__file__`).
One other note - in Python 2.7 it is no longer necessary to redundantly
add files to MANIFEST.in that are listed in `package_data` (in this case,
the templates). That was a bug in distutils in Python 2.6 and previous
that was fixed in Python 2.7. I guess as long as we support 2.6 we should
probably demonstrate a 2.6-compatible technique, but I wonder if it's
worth a brief aside to note the redundancy, and that you don't need it if
generating the sdist using Python 2.7. In any case, whenever Django drops
2.6 support this should be changed.
And lastly: if we keep the link to Eric's article, his last name is
spelled "Holscher".
--
Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16671#comment:23>
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