> I've never really understood the idea that mere installation of a > distribution should need to write to completely arbitrary locations on > the filesystem. Personally, if the software in my distribution needs > things to be put in places that aren't circumscribed by the install > machinery (console scripts are an example of things that *are* > circumscribed by the install machinery) I'll ship the distribution with > a script (often a console script) that people can run that does the > needful, but this never runs during installation.
But that just seems to be deferring the work to a later phase - what happens when you uninstall that distribution? Do you expect the console script you provided to undo what it did when invoked? One example on Windows: PowerShell scripts are looked for by PowerShell in locations other than site-packages. Of course you can ask users to manually tweak environment variables etc. after installation, but I don't see why that's best practice. In general, if a Python library or application is self-contained, I don't disagree with your position. But interoperability with other systems and applications sometimes requires you to be more flexible. Regards, Vinay Sajip _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
