On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sa...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes: > >> That suggests to me that a separate "clean" command in the PEP 376 >> aware tools would be a better choice, where it looks for directories >> that are either empty or contain only __pycache__ subdirectories. Such > > That seems to suggest that you can't be sure of doing a clean uninstallation, > and > the user has to run both uninstall and clean - is that what you meant? It > seems > a shame to have to do that. > > With my suggestion about keeping a list of shared locations around, then > namespace package directories could be kept in such a list. When uninstalling, > all the subpackages added in the particular distribution being uninstalled > would > be removed, but the namespace package directory itself wouldn't be, as a > shared > location. > > Are there any downsides to keeping such a list of shared locations, and using > it in the way I've described?
Yes - it's unnecessary for library directories (e.g. stuff under site-packages). You may safely remove any empty subdirectory of the directories containing the .dist-info, that is a parent of any of the files belonging to the distribution you are uninstalling. (In addition, you may optionally detect and offer to remove extraneous files by cross-checking against all other .dist-info records for that same directory -- a file not listed anywhere is an orphan.) Scripts, man pages, and all that are a separate issue. I would think it would *generally* be safe to use the "remove any empty subdirectory of the relevant base directory which is a parent of a file you uninstalled" rule, but orphan detection would not be possible, and there's some possibility that you could delete an empty directory erroneously. For that purpose, some sort of site-local configuration might be useful, especially if it tracks local conventions like being able to say that e.g., /usr/share/doc/$DISTNAME-$VERSION is the base directory for a package's docs and that it should be considered distribution-owned (and therefore removed if empty, and considered to have orphans if any non-project files are in it). _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
