On 9 December 2015 at 21:35, Robert Collins <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10 December 2015 at 08:39, Erik Bray <[email protected]> wrote: >> Apologies for resending this--my original message got buried in >> unrelated commentary about how *nix filesystems work. Resending with >> new subject line... > > I think its going to break in nasty ways for users on Windows, on a > regular basis.
Agreed. I think that, regardless of debates on how well (or otherwise) particular operating systems handle "in place upgrades", it's a bad idea in principle to try to upgrade a running system, unless that system was designed from the ground up for such behaviour (e.g., Erlang). Even if it can be made to work, documenting the implications and restrictions would be a nightmare. I think that it's better to take a simple approach, and say that you should never upgrade a Python package that's in use, and it's recommended not to import a package that was installed since your Python session started (this latter probably does work in theory, but "unsupported" is an easier position to take than trying to make sure we didn't miss anything). If other languages in Python's niche *do* properly support in-place upgrading, then we can reconsider, but in that case we'd have prior art to look at to see how they did it. Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
