[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[P.J. Eby]

At 03:57 PM 7/8/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>Who's going to use the APIs based around the RECORD file? Anyone?

The distutils uninstall facility, for starters.  easy_install and pip 
also will, eventually.

In all three cases, the use will be in order to avoid overwriting 
files belonging to a system package manager, and in order to 
uninstall/upgrade their own files.

(I can't personally commit that pip will need this; but it's 
currently the only installer besides the distutils that installs 
things in this format, and would therefore need this to prevent 
overwriting things.)

Setuptools will also need to generate RECORD, INSTALLER, and PREFIXES 
appropriately for both development and actual installations.


>Seriously - who is actually going to USE any of the APIs being
>proposed in PEP 376? If no-one's interested, we should stop right now.
>Do any of the people from the summit read this list? If not, can
>anyone contact them and get some feedback?

Package management people aren't likely to be doing anything with 
this stuff directly; if they need a list of installed files they're 
probably using --root or --record at package build time, not needing 
to sniff stuff and installation time, and they already have 
installation facilities.  Their only real need in relation to this 
will be to set an option to generate an INSTALLER file that says you 
can't uninstall their packages manually, thereby preventing the 
package from being uninstalled by the distutils utility, or any other 
well-behaved PEP 376-based package management tool.