[PEAK] Changing installation location (was re: PEAK CVS vs. ZODB CVS :: [pP]ersistence :: Round 1, Fight!)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:47 PM 2/20/04 -0500, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>Sure can!  It's called extra_path .. I can't find documentation for it 
>anywhere..

Me either.  I did find that it exists by googling "distutils .pth", and 
then digging through the distutils source.


>but it works like this:
>dist = setup(
>         ....
>         extra_path="PEAK",
>         ...
>)
>
>and then it will automatically make a PEAK.pth and drop everything in a 
>PEAK folder.
>
>BTW:  the contents of the pth file will be just "PEAK" sans quotes because 
>it's a relative path (though I don't know if it would respect "..")

Actually, this looks pretty cool.  The only downside I see is that existing 
installations of PEAK (or packages installed by PEAK) would need to be 
completely cleaned out first.  Otherwise, the old versions will live on in 
site-packages, which would be come before the .pth in the file.

But, the cool thing is that it would in future be *trivial* to remove or 
update a PEAK installation.  And, it would make it possible to have PEAK 
co-exist with a Zope X3 installation with minimal weirdness.  For example, 
I could have PEAK *always* install ZConfig and persistence, since the Zope 
ones would get used if Zope is installed to site-packages.

What does everybody else think?  Can you live with doing a one-time 
deletion of your existing ZConfig, peak, datetime, csv, fcgiapp, kjbuckets, 
and protocols packages/modules, in order for future installs to have 
everything bundled in a single directory?  Should I make this change to 
PyProtocols as well?