Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

Document virtualenvs as another reason to avoid auto-generated man pages #8

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
May 12, 2017
Merged

Document virtualenvs as another reason to avoid auto-generated man pages #8

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Diff view
Diff view
19 changes: 16 additions & 3 deletions README.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -52,10 +52,23 @@ This approach of installing man pages is problematic for various reasons:

Python in general and with that pip and setuptools are aimed to be platform independent.
Man pages are **not**: they are a UNIX thing which means setuptools does not provide a sane
solution to generate and install man pages.
solution to generate and install man pages.
We should consider using automatic man page installation only with vendor specific packaging, e.g. for `*.deb` or `*.rpm` packages.

#### (2) We want to generate man pages on the fly
#### (2) Man pages are not compatable with Python virtualenvs

Even on systems that support man pages, Python packages can be installed in
virtualenvs via pip and setuptools, which do not make commands available
globally. In fact, one of the "features" of a virtualenv is the ability to
install a package without affecting the main system. As it is imposable to
ensure a man page is only generated when not installing into a virtualenv,
auto-generated man pages would pollute the main system and not stay contained in
the virtualenv. Additionally, as a user could install multiple different
versions of the same package into multiple different virtualenvs on the same
system, there is no guarantee that a globally installed man page will document
the version and behavior available in any given virtualenv.

#### (3) We want to generate man pages on the fly

First, we do not want to commit man pages to our source control.
We want to generate them on the fly. Either
Expand All @@ -64,7 +77,7 @@ during build or installation time.
With setuptools and pip we face two problems:

1. If we generate and install them during installation of the package pip does not know about the man pages and thus cannot uninstall it.
2. If we generate them in our build process and add them to your distribution we do not have a way to prevent installation to */usr/share/man* for non-UNIX-like Operating Systems.
2. If we generate them in our build process and add them to your distribution we do not have a way to prevent installation to */usr/share/man* for non-UNIX-like Operating Systems or from within virtualenvs.

### Debian packages

Expand Down