[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mar 8, 2014 11:57 AM, "Kevin Kofler" <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>
> Tom Callaway wrote:
>
> > Changes to python-setuptools in F20 cause easy_install to install egg
> > files instead of egg directories by default. This sometimes causes
> > problems for rpms of multi-version python modules as the egg filenames
> > are the same if the version of the package hasn't been increased and rpm
> > is unable to replace the directory with a file. To fix this, the ​
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Python_Eggs#Multiple_Versions
> > guideline has been updated to pass the "-Z" switch to easy_install which
> > restores the former behaviour of installing eggs as a directory.
> >
> > If you package a backwards or forwards compat python module that makes
> > use of the Multiple_Versions guideline (or easy_install in some other
> > way), please update your spec file to include the -Z switch.
>
> Couldn't we %pretrans-hack that?
>

In terms of possible, the answer is yes.  In terms of desirable, the answer
is no.  First, the hack you refer to is not guaranteed safe and should be
avoided when alternative meth odds exist.  This guideline change is such an
alternative that simply adds a single upstream cli flag to workaround the
problem.

Secondly, the current standard is to install most scripting language files
in human readable form.  The new easy_install default violates that. using
the flag restores that.

> And with all the issues this and the related symlink problem have caused,
> IMHO, it's really time to fix RPM to support these cases without hacks!

Directory and file interaction is a hard problem. There's no right thing to
do in this case.  The many possible things we could do all have one
drawback or another in certain cases.

-Toshio
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