[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Nick Coghlan]

Eric Smith wrote:
> I really don't get this use case of multiple installers trying to
> install the same package. There's just no way that running "yum install
> twisted" and "apt-get install twisted" and "pip install twisted" are
> going to coexist with each other. The best they can do is say "a file
> I'm trying to install already exists". Why try for anything else?

If that use case doesn't click for you, just focus on the
distutils.uninstall use case. At the moment, there is no automatic
method for uninstalling a distutils installed package. This PEP is
mainly about fixing that situation.

However, if we're going to go to all the effort of having an index of
distutils-installed packages and the metadata needed to uninstall them,
it makes sense to have an official API for querying that datastore. The
fact that that API then provides support for "Did someone else install
this already?" is really a sideshow.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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