How distributions are installed

Right now, when a distribution is installed in Python, every element can be installed in a different directory.

For instance, Distutils installs the pure Python code in the purelib directory, which is lib/python2.6/site-packages for unix-like systems and Mac OS X, or Lib\site-packages under Python’s installation directory for Windows.

Additionally, the install_egg_info subcommand of the Distutils install command adds an .egg-info file for the project into the purelib directory.

For example, for the docutils distribution, which contains one package an extra module and executable scripts, three elements are installed in site-packages:

• docutils: The docutils package.
• roman.py: An extra module used by docutils.
• docutils-0.5-py2.6.egg-info: A file containing the distribution metadata as described in PEP 314 4. This file corresponds to the file called PKG-INFO, built by the sdist command.

Some executable scripts, such as rst2html.py, are also added in the bin directory of the Python installation.

Another project called setuptools 5 has two other formats to install distributions, called EggFormats 8:

• a self-contained .egg directory, that contains all the distribution files and the distribution metadata in a file called PKG-INFO in a subdirectory called EGG-INFO. setuptools creates other files in that directory that can be considered as complementary metadata.
• an .egg-info directory installed in site-packages, that contains the same files EGG-INFO has in the .egg format.

The first format is automatically used when you install a distribution that uses the setuptools.setup function in its setup.py file, instead of the distutils.core.setup one.

setuptools also add a reference to the distribution into an easy-install.pth file.

Last, the setuptools project provides an executable script called easy_install 6 that installs all distributions, including distutils-based ones in self-contained .egg directories.

If you want to have standalone .egg-info directories for your distributions, e.g. the second setuptools format, you have to force it when you work with a setuptools-based distribution or with the easy_install script. You can force it by using the --single-version-externally-managed option or the --root option. This will make the setuptools project install the project like distutils does.

This option is used by :

• the pip 7 installer
• the Fedora packagers 11.
• the Debian packagers 12.

Uninstall information

Distutils doesn’t provide an uninstall command. If you want to uninstall a distribution, you have to be a power user and remove the various elements that were installed, and then look over the .pth file to clean them if necessary.

And the process differs depending on the tools you have used to install the distribution and if the distribution’s setup.py uses Distutils or Setuptools.

Under some circumstances, you might not be able to know for sure that you have removed everything, or that you didn’t break another distribution by removing a file that is shared among several distributions.

But there’s a common behavior: when you install a distribution, files are copied in your system. And it’s possible to keep track of these files for later removal.

Moreover, the Pip project has gained an uninstall feature lately. It records all installed files, using the record option of the install command.

What this PEP proposes

To address those issues, this PEP proposes a few changes:

• A new .dist-info structure using a directory, inspired on one format of the EggFormats standard from setuptools.
• New APIs in pkgutil to be able to query the information of installed distributions.
• An uninstall function and an uninstall script in Distutils.

RECORD

A RECORD file is added inside the .dist-info directory at installation time when installing a source distribution using the install command. Notice that when installing a binary distribution created with bdist command or a bdist-based command, the RECORD file will be installed as well since these commands use the install command to create binary distributions.

The RECORD file holds the list of installed files. These correspond to the files listed by the record option of the install command, and will be generated by default. This allows the implementation of an uninstallation feature, as explained later in this PEP. The install command also provides an option to prevent the RECORD file from being written and this option should be used when creating system packages.

Third-party installation tools also should not overwrite or delete files that are not in a RECORD file without prompting or warning.

This RECORD file is inspired from PEP 262 FILES 3.

The RECORD file is a CSV file, composed of records, one line per installed file. The csv module is used to read the file, with these options:

• field delimiter : ,
• quoting char : ".
• line terminator : os.linesep (so \r\n or \n)

When a distribution is installed, files can be installed under:

• the base location: path defined by the --install-lib option, which defaults to the site-packages directory.
• the installation prefix: path defined by the --prefix option, which defaults to sys.prefix.
• any other path on the system.

Each record is composed of three elements:

• the file’s path
  • a ‘/’-separated path, relative to the base location, if the file is under the base location.
  • a ‘/’-separated path, relative to the base location, if the file is under the installation prefix AND if the base location is a subpath of the installation prefix.
  • an absolute path, using the local platform separator
• a hash of the file’s contents. Notice that pyc and pyo generated files don’t have any hash because they are automatically produced from py files. So checking the hash of the corresponding py file is enough to decide if the file and its associated pyc or pyo files have changed.

  The hash is either the empty string or the hash algorithm as named in hashlib.algorithms_guaranteed, followed by the equals character =, followed by the urlsafe-base64-nopad encoding of the digest (base64.urlsafe_b64encode(digest) with trailing = removed).

• the file’s size in bytes

The csv module is used to generate this file, so the field separator is “,”. Any “,” character found within a field is escaped automatically by csv.

When the file is read, the U option is used so the universal newline support (see PEP 278 10) is activated, avoiding any trouble reading a file produced on a platform that uses a different new line terminator.

Here’s an example of a RECORD file (extract):

lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/__init__.py,md5=nWt-Dge1eug4iAgqLS_uWg,9544
lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/__init__.pyc,,
lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/core.py,md5=X90C_JLIcC78PL74iuhPnA,66188
lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/core.pyc,,
lib/python2.6/site-packages/roman.py,md5=7YhfNczihNjOY0FXlupwBg,234
lib/python2.6/site-packages/roman.pyc,,
/usr/local/bin/rst2html.py,md5=g22D3amDLJP-FhBzCi7EvA,234
/usr/local/bin/rst2html.pyc,,
python2.6/site-packages/docutils-0.5.dist-info/METADATA,md5=ovJyUNzXdArGfmVyb0onyA,195
lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils-0.5.dist-info/RECORD,,

Notice that the RECORD file can’t contain a hash of itself and is just mentioned here

A project that installs a config.ini file in /etc/myapp will be added like this:

/etc/myapp/config.ini,md5=gLfd6IANquzGLhOkW4Mfgg,9544

For a windows platform, the drive letter is added for the absolute paths, so a file that is copied in c:MyAppwill be:

c:\etc\myapp\config.ini,md5=gLfd6IANquzGLhOkW4Mfgg,9544

INSTALLER

The install command has a new option called installer. This option is the name of the tool used to invoke the installation. It’s a normalized lower-case string matching [a-z0-9_\-\.].

$ python setup.py install –installer=pkg-system

It defaults to distutils if not provided.

When a distribution is installed, the INSTALLER file is generated in the .dist-info directory with this value, to keep track of who installed the distribution. The file is a single-line text file.

REQUESTED

Some install tools automatically detect unfulfilled dependencies and install them. In these cases, it is useful to track which distributions were installed purely as a dependency, so if their dependent distribution is later uninstalled, the user can be alerted of the orphaned dependency.

If a distribution is installed by direct user request (the usual case), a file REQUESTED is added to the .dist-info directory of the installed distribution. The REQUESTED file may be empty, or may contain a marker comment line beginning with the “#” character.

If an install tool installs a distribution automatically, as a dependency of another distribution, the REQUESTED file should not be created.

The install command of distutils by default creates the REQUESTED file. It accepts --requested and --no-requested options to explicitly specify whether the file is created.

If a distribution that was already installed on the system as a dependency is later installed by name, the distutils install command will create the REQUESTED file in the .dist-info directory of the existing installation.

New functions and classes in pkgutil

To use the .dist-info directory content, we need to add in the standard library a set of APIs. The best place to put these APIs is pkgutil.

>>> from pkgutil import get_distribution, get_file_users, distinfo_dirname
>>> dist = get_distribution('docutils')
>>> dist.name
'docutils'
>>> dist.metadata.version
'0.5'

>>> distinfo_dirname('docutils', '0.5')
'docutils-0.5.dist-info'

>>> distinfo_dirname('python-ldap', '2.5')
'python_ldap-2.5.dist-info'

>>> distinfo_dirname('python-ldap', '2.5 a---5')
'python_ldap-2.5.a_5.dist-info'

>>> for path, hash, size in dist.get_installed_files()::
...     print '%s %s %d' % (path, hash, size)
...
python2.6/site-packages/docutils/__init__.py,b690274f621402dda63bf11ba5373bf2,9544
python2.6/site-packages/docutils/core.py,9c4b84aff68aa55f2e9bf70481b94333,66188
python2.6/site-packages/roman.py,a4b84aff68aa55f2e9bf70481b943D3,234
/usr/local/bin/rst2html.py,a4b84aff68aa55f2e9bf70481b943D3,234
python2.6/site-packages/docutils-0.5.dist-info/METADATA,6fe57de576d749536082d8e205b77748,195
python2.6/site-packages/docutils-0.5.dist-info/RECORD

>>> dist.uses('docutils/core.py')
True

>>> dist.uses('/usr/local/bin/rst2html.py')
True

>>> dist.get_distinfo_file('METADATA')
<open file at ...>

>>> dist.requested
True

New functions in Distutils

Distutils already provides a very basic way to install a distribution, which is running the install command over the setup.py script of the distribution.

Distutils2 3 will provide a very basic uninstall function, that is added in distutils2.util and takes the name of the distribution to uninstall as its argument. uninstall uses the APIs described earlier and remove all unique files, as long as their hash didn’t change. Then it removes empty directories left behind.

uninstall returns a list of uninstalled files:

>>> from distutils2.util import uninstall
>>> uninstall('docutils')
['/opt/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/core.py',
 ...
 '/opt/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/docutils/__init__.py']

If the distribution is not found, a DistutilsUninstallError is raised.

>>> def _remove_and_log(path):
...     logging.info('Removing %s' % path)
...     return True
...
>>> uninstall('docutils', _remove_and_log)

>>> def _dry_run(path):
...     logging.info('Removing %s (dry run)' % path)
...     return False
...
>>> uninstall('docutils', _dry_run)

>>> uninstall('docutils')
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
DistutilsUninstallError: docutils was installed by 'cool-pkg-manager'

>>> uninstall('docutils', installer='cool-pkg-manager')

$ python -m distutils2.uninstall projectname