David Cournapeau <[email protected]> writes:

> My suggestion for a better scheme would be to use an extended version
> of the various default directories defined by autotools. The extension
> would handle windows-specifics.

This is a good direction to go, IMO.

The expectations of Windows and *nix, when it comes to where files
should be installed, are so disparate that abstracting the locations to
functional labels which mean the same on all platforms will inevitably
result in a lot of such labels.

So, if we agree that such abstraction is worthwhile to pursue, the large
set of labels (and perhaps even leaving it open to growing even more)
should be embraced.

> # Suggested variables
>
> The goal of supporting those variables is to take something that is
> flexible enough to support almost any installation scheme, without
> putting additional burden on the developer. People who do not
> want/need the flexibility will not need to do anything more than what
> they do today.

A point to note is that “people” in that statement can be different
people with conflicting wants/needs.

The developer who writes the Distutils metadata may want to have as
little in there as possible, at the expense of flexibility in
installation. The system integrator who needs to specify many different
locations for the various files in the distribution will want the
opposite.

They still need to work on the same code base.

So perhaps one consideration is that the distribution metadata should be
extensible by the integrator, without extensive patches to the Python
code; and the developer's code as written still finds the files in the
resulting filesystem locations. Is that feasible?

> The variables I would suggest are every variable defined in
> https://github.com/cournape/Bento/blob/master/bento/core/platforms/sysconfig.py#L10,
> except for destdir which is not relevant here.

That looks like a lot of named locations. I think that is inevitable, as
argued above.

> For now, I would be happy to just make a proof of concept not caring
> about backward compatibility in a pip branch. Does that sound like a
> workable basis to flush out an actual proposal ?

Looking forward to it. Thanks!

-- 
 \     “Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a |
  `\       man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.” |
_o__)                                                 —John A. Hrastar |
Ben Finney

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