[Pkg-samba-maint] r1165 - trunk

[Peter Eisentraut]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> The problem I have with the current patch is the split of the arch:
> any files into /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages, with the arch: all
> files into /usr/share/pycentral/, when we are only shipping support
> for one version of python at a time and therefore pycentral gives us
> no benefits, only complexity.

Considering the effort required to clean up this stuff by hand without 
any helpers, the added "complexity" of an extra dh_pycentral call sure 
doesn't seem so bad.  (Note that this is really all the patch does.)  
And really, all packages are supposed to split their files 
between /usr/lib and /usr/share as appropriate, so this is not unusual.

> So it would be nice to leave everything in
> /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages and fix up the handling of
> byte-compiling, which should be possible, but I don't yet understand
> what was wrong in the first place that resulted in .pyc files being
> left behind.

It seems as though whenever python reads some foo.py file and it has the 
appropriate write access, it will leave a foo.pyc file behind next to 
it.  Besides randomly cluttering directories under /usr/lib with only 
little chance of deterministic cleanup, it also has strange effects 
such as "python setup.py clean" *creating* *.pyc files instead of 
cleaning them up.  Much of the complexity in python-central and 
python-support tries to deal with that first problem.  Now much has 
been said about the elegance of either of these solutions, but they are 
the endorsed methods of the python maintainers and they sure seem to 
solve the problem, so why should we second guess that?