I understand the PEP author's frustration with continued discussion, but I think this subthread on Obsoletes vs. Obsoleted-By is not mere bikeshedding on names. It matters *which package* presents the information.
Donald Stufft writes: > On Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote: > > On Dec 05, 2012, at 06:07 PM, Donald Stufft wrote: > > > > > If you're installing B you've prescribed trust to that > > > author. If you don't trust the author then why are you > > > installing (and then executing) code they wrote. The author may be a genius when it comes to writing code, and an idiot when it comes to distributing it. Distribution is much harder than it looks, as you know. Trusting the author's *content* and trusting the author's *metadata* are not equivalent! As far as I can see, the semantics of putting "Obsoletes: A" into B without changing A are the same as the semantics of putting "Provides: A" into B (without changing A).[1] Only if A includes "Obsoleted-By: B" can a user be confident that B is a true successor to A. Furthermore, as has been pointed out, the presence of "Obsoleted-By" in A has the huge advantage of informing users and developers of dependent packages alike that A is obsolete when they try to update A. If A is not changed, then an attempted update will tell them exactly that, and they may never find out about B. But if A is modified in this trivial way, the package system can automatically inform them. This is also trivial, requiring no database queries. "Simple is better than complex." Footnotes: [1] A trustworthy author of B wouldn't use "Provides" unless he thought B was indeed a drop-in, and presumbly superior, replacement for A. And that's all that "Obsoletes" can tell you! _______________________________________________ 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