[Python-Dev] PEP 376 : Changing the .egg-info structure

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:21 AM 5/15/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>Hello
>
>I'm proposing this PEP, which has been discussed in Distutils-SIG, for
>inclusion in Python 2.7 and 3.2
>
>http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0376/
>
>Please comment !

I'd like to reiterate my suggestion that the uninstall record include 
size and checksum information, ala PEP 262's "FILES" section.  This 
would allow the uninstall function to validate whether a file has 
been modified, and thus prevent uninstalling a locally-modified file, 
or a file installed in some other way.

It may also be that providing an uninstall API that simply yields 
files to be uninstalled, with data about their existence/modification 
status, would be more useful than a blind uninstall operation with a 
filter function.

Also, the PEP doesn't document what happens if a single file was 
installed by more than one package.  Ideally, a file with identical 
size/checksum that belongs to more than one project should be 
silently left alone, and a file installed by more than one project 
with *different* size/checksum should be warned about and left alone.

Next, the doc for the metadata API functions seems quite 
sparse.  ISTR that I've previously commented on such issues as case- 
and punctuation-insensitivity of project names, and '/' separation in 
egg_info subpaths, but these don't seem to have been incorporated 
into the current version of the PEP.

These are important considerations in general, btw, because project 
name and version canonicalization and escaping are an important part 
of both generating and parsing .egg-info filenemaes.  At minimum, the 
relevant setuptools docs that define these standards should be cited.

Finally, the "Definitions" section also claims that a project 
installs one or more packages, but a project may not contain *any* 
packages; it may have a standalone module, or just a script, data, or metadata.