[Distutils] elements of setuptools/wheel/FHS file categories proposal

[Paul Moore]

On 20 April 2015 at 16:30, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pip would choose its defaults to be as
> unsurprising as possible compared to its current model. Hopefully we
> will never have to talk about fine grained install scheme
> customization again after specifying how to make it possible.

All of the other packaging PEPs are careful to define things in terms
of "installers", including pip but admitting the possibility that
other installers might exist. I think this PEP should do the same, and
define the behaviour of an "installer" (pip, distil, etc) while
leaving the option for other things (such as package format
converters) to use different schemes.

I don't recall if I said this before in the private email thread or
here, but I'll repeat it here so it'd recorded on distutils-sig: I'm
strongly against the PEP offering no guidance on the default mappings
to use for the "normal case" of installing a package from PyPI for use
in Python scripts (i.e., the pip model). There are a number of
installation scenarios encapsulated in pip, and it is only reasonable
that users should expect all installers to behave the same for them -
i.e., there's a standard mapping.

Apologies if I've said this on the list before - too many email
threads, not enough time to check them.

I won't labour this point any more until the PEP review phase.
Paul