how GNU stow is complementary rather than alternative to distutils

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
> On May 10, 2009, at 11:18 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
>> If GNU stow solves all your problems, why do you want to use
>> easy_install in the first place?
> 
> That's a good question.  The answer is that there are two separate jobs:
> building executables and putting them in a directory structure of the
> appropriate shape for your system is one job, and installing or
> uninstalling that tree into your system is another.  GNU stow does only
> the latter.

And so does easy_install - it's job is *not* to build the executables
and to put them in a directory structure. Instead, it's
distutils/setuptools which has this job.

The primary purpose of easy_install is to download the files from PyPI
(IIUC).

> The thing that prevents this from working with setuptools is that
> setuptools creates a file named easy_install.pth

It will stop doing that if you ask nicely. That's why I recommended
earlier that you do ask it not to edit .pth files.

> If I understand correctly,
> your (MvL's) suggestion that easy_install create a .pth file named
> "easy_install-$PACKAGE-$VERSION.pth" instead of "easy_install.pth" would
> indeed make it work with GNU stow.

My recommendation is that you use the already existing flag to
setup.py install that stops it from editing .pth files.

Regards,
Martin