At 10:07 PM 11/23/2005 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
I try to use very long names for options that can have damaging effects
if used indiscriminately. A project that's installed the "old-fashioned
way" (which is what this does, apart from adding .egg-info) is hard to
uninstall and may overwrite other projects' files. So, it is only safe
to use if the files are being managed by some external package manager,
and it further only works for a single installed version at a time. So
the name is intended to advertise these facts, and to discourage people
who are just reading the option list from trying it out to see what it
does. :)
And that is indeed a fine principle. The option would only occur
inside debian/rules (which is the Makefile to build the deb file),
so users would never need to type it manually (except for the DD
creating debian/rules).
My request would be that the option is stable in its meaning,
e.g. if there is a need to extend/change its semantics, a different
option is introduced (unless it is certain that existing Debian
packages would continue to build correctly under the new meaning).
Since this option exists only to provide a backward-compatible layout for
external package managers, I can't see how it would change in terms of
layout. I can imagine that across different versions, I might provide a
different set of warnings, however. For example, it seems to me I might
want to have this option check for existing files prior to installation,
and abort if any are found. This seems like a good thing to do since
external packaging uses would likely be run against a clean target or put
into a temporary directory anyway.
I'm also debating whether this option should also require the --record
option, since there might otherwise be no way for an external packaging
tool to know which files and directories belong to the installed package.
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