[tahoe-dev] startup error after upgrade

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com>wrote:

>
>
>> In that case, there
>> would be no "module that you mustn't import" in the same place as a
>> "module you want to
>> import".
>>
>
> Well... you could also have other name-collisions...
>

Oh, in fact, you could still have the exact same problem!

Before setuptools even existed, people already installed different versions
of the same-named module into their system, for example you could have v1.0
of the "foo" module in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages and v2.0 of the
"foo" module in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages. You could then set
the PYTHONPATH to control which "foo" module you got when you did "import
foo". So, if you had a version of "foo" in one directory that you had to
not-use, and a version of "bar" in the other directory that you had to
not-use, then you'd have exactly this same problem.

Now, you could argue that setuptools made the existing problem happen more
often by training people to think that they could install a new version of
a Python module *without* first manually uninstalling the old one. But,
doesn't it actually *work* for new versions that are installed with
setuptools? I'm confused.

To be honest, I don't understand if this issue is actually related to Greg
Troxel's complaint up-thread. :-(

Greg: could you try translating your complaint into Python terms? You
explained in terms of libtool, which is not something I'm very familiar
with.

Regards,

Zooko
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