[Vinay]
> I think you mean "Only the paste/util directory is recorded."
Obviously :)

> How about if you record all directories that you would create if they didn't exist, as well
> as those actually created? That way, you would record the paste directory under both
> distributions, but would only delete it when deleting the last distribution which uses it
This is what I proposed earlier: we’d need to record all directories that would have been created, but I’m not sure if it will be possible.  For example, if one uses --prefix /tmp/usr and pysetup install creates /tmp/usr, /tmp/usr/lib, /tmp/usr/lib/python2.7, /tmp/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages, /tmp/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spam and /tmp/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Spam-0.1.dist-info, then we pysetup should Spam, should packaging remove only the package and dist-info directories or also the site-packages, python2.7, lib and usr directories?

[Carl]
> In short - pip would _love_ to have directories recorded as well as files, exactly as Vinay
> has proposed. We don't have that info (even the distutils --record option currently doesn't
> record directories, thus installed-files.txt doesn't contain directories), so we are reduced
> to some nasty things like referring to top-level.txt in order to avoid lots of empty
> directories hanging about,
Oh.  Ouch.

> which in itself was the subject of recent controversy re Twisted's custom namespace
> packages implementation.
Ah, I understand that better now.  Maybe now would be a good time to start an alpha pip-on-distutils2 branch, to see if the API we offer is good enough and to work out possible bugs in new features offered to pip by d2 (removing directories, installing setup.cfg-based projects, supporting bdists).

> Please, let's have directories recorded in RECORD,
Okay, so I will champion a patch to PEP 376.