People won’t always read all the docs – it’s a fact – so sooner or later some other new comer will experience this issue complain, gave up and worse even blog his/hers negative experience. We do want the newbie experience to be as painless as possible which means popularity and growth of the framework - and ultimately continuation of our paying jobs.
This thread was started by a newbie to the framework, putting aside the confrontational tone it stated some valid concerns from a beginners perspective – a very important perspective. I’ve been using django for a long time and had no idea about this ‘distutils’ caveat; I do not understand or know how django installs setup process works but am up for some kind of a warning/error directly to the console. Thank you for reading my opinion. Daniel From: Florian Apolloner Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 2:15 AM To: django-developers@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: extra files in startproject On Friday, April 13, 2012 6:49:32 AM UTC+2, Alex Ogier wrote: I have seen setup.py's that use remove_tree as part of a "clean" command to allow someone to run "setup.py clean && setup.py install" to obtain a pristine distribution idempotently, which I think is a good idea. No, they should work on fixing distutils instead of creating solutions which probably could break even worse. The alternative is to have everyone remember to "rm -rf" their site-packages django every time they run setup.py install which is a bit unsavory in my opinion. Or just tell them to use either pip even for development installs or just set their PYTHONPATH. If someone has managed to get extra files in their site-packages, because at any point they followed a tutorial on how to build from source, then their django installation is basically caput until they manually "rm -rf" a deep library path. One option is to document this and explain what to do You made me lol, that approach is documented in the install guide: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/install/#remove-any-old-versions-of-django -- If people would actually read the docs this issue wouldn't exist. FWIW the docs also mention to symlink a dev checkout and don't tell you to run setup.py That would mean listing somewhere the files from django/conf/project_template/ that should be included, which isn't very DRY, but is the only 100% solution I think. Given that the documentation shows how to do it properly I don't see any point. Especially since this problem isn't related to the project_template alone -- that's just where it's most visible. So, that should give you some idea of the perils of not cleaning your output directories (or in this case, input directory). We are aware of those, and fwiw: If you use git and switch branches it's up to you to know how python works and how git clean works, or do you want to suggest that django should rm al pyc files on startup?! My recommendation is to make "setup.py clean" do everything possible to ensure idempotent installation across any version, document that, and call it a day. What's wrong with the current documented approach? (Aside from the fact that people don't read it, but then again they won't read the setup.py clean either). Regards, Florian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-developers/-/SbdWA7plRx4J. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
