2009/6/4 Tarek Ziadé <ziade.ta...@gmail.com>: >>> - PEP 376 | status : waiting for Phillip complementary feedback (and >>> anyone else of course) >> >> >> I can imagine distutils uninstalling files previously installed by dpkg >> as a shortcut to breaking a machine. Though I'm not sure what will >> actually happen in practice. > > Distutils defines a standard for an EGG-INFO structure, and provides a > API for the uninstallation that is more likely to be a reference > implementation. > > Although, It is already providing an install feature. > > If uninstalling a package with Distutils, while it was installed by dpkg > breaks, > > I can imagine that in the very same system, you can also break it > if you *install* packages with Distutils, easy_install, pip because > you shortcut dpkg > as well.
With Windows, if you install using bdist_wininst and then uninstall using the (currently nonexistent) distutils uninstall, I'd expect that it wouldn't remove the Add/Remove programs support items in the registry, and the Removexxx.exe and xxx-wininst.log files installed by bdist_wininst. The system would then still think that the package was installed, even though it isn't. (And the system uninstall may break - I'm not sure). Given that Windows doesn't do dependency management, this is a relatively minor form of breakage, but on a system that does, having the system metadata wrong could cause incorrect dependencies to be installed at a later date. > I think this is the responsability of such a system to make sure it handles > all installation and uninstallation. It's surely not the responsibility of the OS to handle you "going behind its back" - if I did "rm -rf /usr" on a Unix system, I wouldn't think that it's the responsibility of the system to handle this (other than by breaking!) I'd say that it's distutils' responsibility not to offer to uninstall anything it didn't install. Paul. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
