Re: Python conflicts.

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> writes:

> Hi Guix,
>
> there are two things related to the installation of Python modules that
> I would like to see changed; but as I may not understand what side
> effects the proposed changes might have I'd like to gather some opinions
> first.
>
> 1) Nosetests
>
> Installing Python modules that have an input "python-nose" (always?)
> install "$out/bin/nosetests" and various wrappers around this script.
> This script is not very useful for a user of the module as it only runs
> the test suite.  As we're often propagating Python module inputs, the
> installation of one Python module usually results in conflicts with the
> various versions of "$out/bin/nosetests" that are to be installed into
> the profile.
>
> This makes the nosetests scripts even less useful as an arbitrary
> version will end up in the profile.  I'd like to exclude them from
> installation in all Python packages, maybe by modifying
> "python-build-system" such that the files are deleted from the output
> directory again.
>
> What I don't like about using the "python-build-system" for this is that
> "$out/bin/nosetests" is only created when "python-nose" (or
> "python2-nose") is a package input.  Is there a better way?  Can we
> prevent the creation of the "nosetests" script (and its wrappers), maybe
> with some flag to setuptools?
>
> 2) lib/python$version/site-packages/site.{py,pyc}
>
> Another file that frequently causes conflicts is "site.py" (and its
> compiled cousin).  It seems to me that "site.py" doesn't contain any
> module-specific information and is probably the same for all modules.  I
> would like to change "python-build-system" such that Python modules do
> not install this file at all.
>
> The only problem I see is that the "python" package itself does not come
> with this file.  If it should be provided at all I think that it should
> come from the "python" package, rather than any of the modules that may
> or may not be installed.

'site.py[c]' is installed and used by 'setuptools' based
programs/libraries. The purpose of the file is to add sub-directories to
PYTHONPATH. If you remove the file, libraries configured with setuptools
will not work anymore, unless you do the work done by 'site.py' in
another way.

https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/easy_install.html

Regards,
Fede