Hi, I've taken over the pychecker package from Arto Jantunen, and I'm looking over the remaining bugs. One of the three is #137320: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=137320 It requests that the Pychecker modules be installed in the Python search path, so they can be imported, rather than in /usr/share/pychecker. (The modules are intended to be used this way; it's one of the documented usage scenarios described on the upstream website.) Arto declined to do this because it would "cost [him] the ability to support all available versions of python and the ability to select the version to use". In the meantime, the bug submitter has been working around this with a hand-maintained soft-link. I think that this bug is important enough to be dealt with, and I'm looking for opinions on the best way to do it. Right now, what I am thinking of doing is creating a set of pythonX.Y-pychecker packages. The pychecker package would depend on python2.3-pychecker and would suggest the rest. The /usr/bin/pychecker wrapper would be changed to use /usr/bin/python2.3 by default. If the user used $PYTHONVER to specify an alternate version other than 2.3, the wrapper would look for the Python modules in the appropriate /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages directory and call /usr/bin/pythonX.Y. If the site-packages directory was not found, the wrapper would return an error something like "Pychecker modules not available for python version X.Y; install the pythonX.Y-pychecker package first." I assume that I would provide packages and support for all "standard" Debian Python versions (right now 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3); requesting an unsupported version with $PYTHONVER would result in an error. The main thing I think this loses over the existing solution is that the wrapper script would no longer directly support using the pychecker modules with a version of Python that is in the user's $PATH but is not managed by dpkg. I see this to be of little consequence, but I don't know how others feel about it. Anyone have an opinion about this plan? Is there a downside or some big hole I'm missing here? Or is there some reason why I would want to leave the modules in /usr/share/pychecker rather than in the various site-packages directories? Thanks for the feedback. KEN -- Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@debian.org>
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