2009/10/8 Carl Meyer <c...@meyerloewen.net>: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hey all, > > I propose adding a bit to the PEP 376 metadata that indicates whether a > package was installed by user request or as a dependency of another > package. This would allow (un)installer tools to intelligently remove > orphaned dependencies, if they so choose. There might be questions about > the details of such an uninstaller feature, but I'm not intending to > discuss that here. The metadata itself is simple enough to track, and > seems like it ought to be included for its future usefulness. > > I propose adding a metadata file REQUIRED within the .egg-info > directory. The presence of this file indicates that the user > specifically required this distribution. The absence of the file > indicates that the distribution was installed as a dependency. The > contents of the file are not used.
Debian's Apt has this capability, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackageDependencyManagement . It keeps a separate file to track the manually installed packages, and the flag is named "Auto-Installed". REQUIRED is an ambiguous name -- is it required by other packages, or wanted by user for any reason (and that is the case)? > > For the API, I propose adding a "required" property to the Distribution > class, which would be True or False based on the presence or absence of > the REQUIRED file. > > I've added a demo implementation to a fork of Tarek's pep376 repo on > bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/carljm/pep376/changeset/0c8002e65cb7/ > > Thoughts? > > Carl _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
