[Distutils] PEP 345 update + RFC on "Requires-External" and "Requires-Python"

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:56 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Piotr Ozarowski wrote:
>>>
>>> [Tres Seaver, 2009-11-16]
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Values could be things like "libxslt", "libpng", etc..
>>>>>
>>>>> Am I right in understanding this as informational field only ?
>>>>
>>>> Yes.  The primary consumers will be OS packagers, who will map them onto
>>>> their own package names.  As with other metadata they care about, we
>>>> hope that the packagers will suggest packages to make these names
>>>> "uniform" acrrss Python distributions.  I imagine there will be some
>>>> jockeying among them to find the "common" name for such things, which
>>>> they will then need to map.
>>>
>>> How about putting there what we (distro maintainers) can pass to
>>> ctypes.util.find_library()?
>>
>> How cross platform is that?
>
> near none. I don't see much point in a field for this feature: that's
> a typical example where every os vendor is different, and it would
> bring more confusion that it worth IMHO.

I agree.

And I can think about a few scenarii where the names managment at PyPI
will be a nightmare.

The PyPI manager will have to decide unilaterally the names to keep,
the names to change,  and he will need to maintain aliases for names
that points to the same lib, to make both camps happy,
and possibly keep backward compatibilities for those names.

I am proposing to remove the Requires-External completely from PEP
345, unless someone wants it badly. (And he/she will need to go into
greater details in these scenarii)

Tarek