Ian Bicking <i...@colorstudy.com> writes: > I'm just about ready to run screaming from this discussion... so no, > I want no part of determining what the "right" place for these files > is
As I understand it, you are speaking from the perspective of a “developer”; that is, someone who intends to share the software work you've written, but leave the packaging of that work for particular OSen to other people. In that case, you're *not* being asked to determine what the “right” installation location of files is; that's exactly the shift in control that's being requested here, by divorcing the decision about what the *purpose* of a file is from what its installed *location* will be. Instead, you're being asked only to determine which category a file belongs to; and those categories are (modulo some historical quirks, due to David's obvious strong preference for the C-language-focussed ‘autoconf’) mostly about the *purpose* of a file — precisely to allow that determination to be made without the same person needing to know about install locations. > I imagine some file like package-data.conf, containing: > > data mypackage/templates/ > docs docs/_build/ > > At least in this example the first word is some tag, and the second > is the directory, or files, or maybe a wildcard or something > determining what files that tag applies to. Everything not declared > but present in a package (or as a module) would default to "lib", > and everything outside of that (like the setup.py file) would be > "ignore". This is (with implementation differences) entirely compatible with what David's proposing, AFAICT. The message you responded to, though, was discussing the complementary part: the install location of (in your example) ‘docs’, ‘data’, ‘lib’, etc. If you want no part of that, you're welcome to avoid it; and that's exactly the kind of partition that is being striven for here. > On installation, you'd write something like > mypackage.egg-info/file-locations.txt, that might look like: > > mypackage/templates/ -> /usr/share/mypackage/templates/ > docs/_build/ -> /usr/share/doc/mypackage > > (I'm not sure what the syntax would look like, but whatever.) Here, though, you lose the very useful categorisation you set up above. AIUI, David is proposing that install location be a mapping not from file path to file path, but from file *purpose* (as categorised above) to install file path. -- \ “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, | `\ neat, and wrong.” —Henry L. Mencken | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
