[Python-Dev] Keyword meanings [was: Accept just PEP-0426] (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Dec 8 02:33:45 CET 2012

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 3:47 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

In effect, a "conflicts" field actually creates conflicts and maintenance burdens where they did not previously exist, because even after the conflict no longer really existed, an automated tool would have prevented PyDispatch from being installed, or, per your suggestion above, unnecessarily uninstalled it after a user installed RuleDispatch.

That's not what a Conflicts field is for. It's to allow a project to say they don't support installing in parallel with another package. It doesn't matter why it's unsupported, it's making a conflict perceived by the project explicit in their metadata.

Such a field is designed to convey information to users about supported configurations, regardless of whether or not they happen to work for a given use case. If a user believes a declared conflict is in error, and having the two installed in parallel is important to them, they can:

  1. Use virtual environments to keep the two projects isolated from each other
  2. Use an installer that ignores Conflicts information (which will be all of them, since that's the status quo)
  3. Make their case to the upstream project that the conflict has been resolved, and installing the two in parallel no longer causes issues

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20121208/d8ad0b17/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list