Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Thu, 9 Jul 2009 08:07:21 am Eric Smith wrote:
But I think we've veered into metadata that describes what has been
installed. I don't think that's so useful. As I've said, this is
private to the installers. If 2 installers want to communicate with
each other about what they've installed, then they can agree on that
data. I just don't find it generally useful for all installers, and
therefore not useful for distutils.
But doesn't this metadata give any two installers a common language to
use to communicate, instead of having every pair of installers create
their own private communication method?
I really don't get this use case of multiple installers trying to
install the same package. There's just no way that running "yum install
twisted" and "apt-get install twisted" and "pip install twisted" are
going to coexist with each other. The best they can do is say "a file
I'm trying to install already exists". Why try for anything else?
Personally, I like to be able to look at a package and say "What did
that install?" Or contrary-wise, look at a file and say "What package
installed that?"
I completely support that. All of the system installers I know of
support this (at least on Linux; I'm familiar with the msi database
layout (as exposed by Orca) on Windows, but I've never looked to see if
they record the results of installing an msi). I just see this as an
issue within each installer. Why would the installers need to
communicate this with each other?
There are few things worse than discovering a bunch of
mysterious executable files on your system that you don't remember
installing, and then spending a few paranoid hours trying to determine
whether you've stumbled across a root kit or virus or whether they have
a legitimate reason to be there.
We can't solve the problem of "here's an arbitrary file on the system,
where did it come from?". There are many, many installers outside of our
control that might have installed something. Ruby has installers, Perl
has installers, I'm sure there are hundreds of such installers. The user
might have even used wget to install something.
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
