[Distutils] Platform specific destinations in wheel files?

[Chris Barker]

On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Daniel Holth > Agreed. My biggest concern
with this whole idea is that developers

>  > (typically POSIX developers, but it applies equally to all) will
> > *think* they need something like sbin because they are used to the
> > concept from their environment, and so write their wheel to use it and
> > hence be platform specific.
>

exactly.

However, with a little thought (possibly
> > hardly any thought in the case of sbin :-)) they could have chosen a
> > more generic approach which makes their project available to users of
> > other platforms.
>

right, but setting the system up to allow a prefix and then hard-specify
paths under that makes it impossible to do it cross-platform!

> Portable by default should be the principle.
>

+1 ... and at least possible (without writing multiple platform-specific
versions...)!

ANother thought is:

who should control where things are put?

a) the package developer?
b) the python system maintainer?

I think clearly the answer is (b). i.e. we'll have reasonable defaults in
the python.org builds, but if Anaconda or Canopy, or a BSD or a linux
distro, or Raspberry Pi, or Micro..... could all define their own paths for
standard locations. I think this is much better than the package
maintainers fixing that.

The GNU autoconf paths are the obvious choice.


Certainly a good palce to start.

One issue -- that (and the FHS) is built around the idea of a "prefix",
where you can shift the whole pile to /usr or /usr/local, or /opt, or???

But that concept doesn't work on all platforms, so we should be careful
about isolating it.

-Chris



> It would be really easy
> to try adding these to the dict that wheel installers use to relocate
> stuff.
> http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html
>



-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
NOAA/NOS/OR&R            (206) 526-6959   voice
7600 Sand Point Way NE   (206) 526-6329   fax
Seattle, WA  98115       (206) 526-6317   main reception

Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20131224/3ae22a60/attachment.html>