As promised, here are some open questions on PEP 376. - Will the public API names be changed from *egginfo* to *metadata*?
- What precisely are the use cases for absolute path names? Concrete examples are needed. With the current spec, some things can go wrong (e.g., see below), so we need real use cases to know how to address this. - How will bdist_wininst/bdist_msi/bdist_rpm be updated? - How will the RECORD file be managed? (Particularly for the case of bdist_xxx) [1] - Can distutils be made to install files in places the current RECORD file spec can't handle? (I think the answer is "yes"). What happens then? - Should distribution names be case insensitive on case insensitive filesystems? For comparison, module/package names are always case sensitive even on case insensitive systems. - What will happen with the md5 hash? Are more types of hash going to be supported? What's the default? (Actually, the PEP doesn't need to care about the default, as the PEP says nothing about how RECORD files are written). [1] Note - the idea of using $EXEC_PREFIX / $PREFIX implies that the RECORD file is intended to be relocatable. Which is worrying, and also implies that an individual Distribution class must be able to handle filesystem files as well as whatever else it handles (consider mylib.zip on sys.path, containing a distribution which installed some files in $PREFIX). If this isn't possible, it should be clearly stated that it isn't possible. If it is, the ramifications are complex... I'm still unsure how the local vs relative, slash-separated filename formats should be handled. I don't actually think there's any real benefit in having 2 formats. I propose: - get_installed_files(), uses(), get_file_users() - always use local format absolute pathnames (for zipfiles and the like, these may not be "real" filenames, but they will be in "real filename" format, so other code will be able to manipulate them as filenames). - get_egginfo_files, get_egginfo_file - always use slash-separated forms, relative to the egginfo directory (so the name of the RECORD file is just 'RECORD') But there could be uses I haven't thought about, so this still counts as an open question at the moment (i.e., I'm reluctant to implement things this way until I've had some feedback). Paul. _______________________________________________ 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
