On Feb 14, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Joe Smith wrote: > > "Guido van Rossum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> In private email, Phillip Eby suggested to add these things to the >> 2.5. standard library: >> >> bdist_deb, bdist_msi, and friends >> >> He explained them as follows: >> >> """ >> bdist_deb makes .deb files (packages for Debian-based Linux >> distros, like >> Ubuntu). bdist_msi makes .msi installers for Windows (it's by >> Martin v. >> Loewis). Marc Lemburg proposed on the distutils-sig that these and >> various >> other implemented bdist_* formats (other than bdist_egg) be >> included in >> the >> next Python release, and there was no opposition there that I recall. >> """ >> > > I don't like the idea of bdist_deb very much. > The idea behind the debian packaging system is that unlike with RPM > and > Windows, package management should be clean. > > Windows and RPM are known for major dependency problems, letting > packages > damage each other, having packages that do not uninstall cleanly (i.e. > packages that leave junk all over the place) and generally messing > the sytem > up quite baddly over time, so that the OS is usually removed and > re-installed periodically.)
This is one problem that eggs go a LONG way towards solving, especially for platforms such as Windows and OS X that do not ship with an intelligent package management solution. The way that eggs are built more or less guarantees that they remain consistent, because it temporarily replaces file/open/etc and some other functions with sanity checks to make sure that the installation layout is self-contained** and thus compatible with eggs. It's not a real chroot, of course, but it's good enough for all practical purposes. The only things that easy_install overwrites** in the context of eggs are other eggs with an identical filename (version, platform, etc.), unless explicitly asked to do otherwise (e.g. remove some existing older version). Uninstallation is of course similarly clean, because it just nukes one directory or .egg file, and/or an associated .pth file. ** The exception is scripts. Scripts go wherever --install-scripts= point to, and AFAIK there is no means to ensure that the scripts from one egg do not interfere with the scripts for another egg or anything else on the PATH. I'm also not sure what the uninstallation story with scripts is. -bob _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
