On Jul 11, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote: ... >> IOW, setuptools' focus is more on distribution filename safety, >> rather >> than on sensible naming distinctions for end users. The former is >> less >> restrictive than the latter, I believe. > > Yes. However, it's not clear to me that the infrastructure needs to > (or even is able to) enforce sensible naming. Instead, any policing > that might be necessary should be done in the community. If two > packages are named too similarly, users will get confused, and > eventually one package may disappear, get renamed, get its naming > challenged in court, and so on. It's not the job of the package > *index* to do that sort of policing.
When Phillip designed setuptools, he tried to have a very low impact on lots of systems. He did that very well and that has allowed setuptools to be adopted gradually with very little up front buy in. One of the decisions Phillip made was to not use an installed-package database other than sys.path. When a distribution is installed, the installed file name reflects the package name. If you want to know whether a package is installed, you can scan sys.path looking for files or directories that contain/reflect the package name. IMO, this was a very good decision, however, it does have the disadvantage that it may run afoul of system file-naming limitations. Again, I think this was a fair trade off. The questions for us is, how much effort we are willing to make to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot. I can understand why Phillip would like the package index to prevent people from choosing problematic package names. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
