2009/7/1 R. David Murray <rdmur...@bitdance.com>: > I haven't read the PEP in detail since it's outside my area of interest > and knowledge(*), but my understanding of the goal is that the PEP is > providing an _infrastructure_ for system-level package management tools. > The uninstall function is part of that infrastructure, but since > distutils isn't a package manager itself (it's an install program), > distutils as currently organized can't really handle uninstall except > as outlined in a section you may have clipped from the above context > (ie: when setup.py from the original package is available).
>From a Windows user's POV, "install program" = "package manager". And an install program needs an uninstall feature. I know Linux users with their advanced dependency-managing package managers feel that this is a stone-age view, and they may be right, but the PEP needs to take the Windows situation into account. > The question is what do the people who do real package management > (linux distribution level package management and the equivalent) think? > I'm guessing they are happy with just having the function for their > package management tools to call when needed, since (I'm hoping) they > are part of the distutils sig.... Don't forget that the maintainers of the bdist_wininst, bdist_msi and bdist_rpm code *are* the distutils maintainers - so to that extent, the PEP has to say how *those* aspects of package managers are covered. Unless another PEP is accepted saying that support for bdist_xxx is being dropped [1], this part of distutils cannot be ignored. > > So, if my understanding of the overall goal is correct, it looks to me > like the PEP is missing a "motivation" section that talks about system > package managers. Possibly. If so, though, it must discuss the above 3 cases which are part of core distutils. Paul. [1] A PEP I plan on strongly opposing! _______________________________________________ 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
