[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Nick Coghlan]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 7:09 AM, P.J. Eby<pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>> So I punned on that in order to imply that nobody who takes on the job of
>> packaging expects to be asked the kind of detailed, unanswerable questions
>> that come with the territory of packaging, or to be subjected to torture by
>> third parties merely for trying to do something useful.
>>
>> And, by further implication, I was thus expressing camaraderie with you on
>> your initiation into the wonderful world of trying to satisfy everyone in
>> Pythonland, and our shared experience in the area of "if I'd really known
>> what I was getting into, I probably wouldn't have".  ;-)
> 
> Hehe very nice, thanks for the explanation :)
> 
> (thanks to the others too)

I think is exchange actually a good reminder that the bar for acceptance
of PEP 376 shouldn't be "Addresses every possible packaging issue we can
come up with". That would be setting expectations far too high because
packaging cross-platform is so messy.

A more appropriate bar is probably:
  a) Better that what we have now; and
  b) Provides possible avenues for even more improvement in the future

For example, I quite like the concept behind the various ideas for
"location" or "prefix" definitions either in the RECORD file itself or
in a separate PREFIXES file, since such approaches feeds directly in to
part b) above. Once some kind prefix definition mechanism is in place in
the metadata, it becomes possible to leverage it to categorise files for
the benefit of system packagers while still allowing simple
internal-use-only packages to just bundle everything together.

Cheers,
Nick.

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