[Distutils] tracking requested vs dependency installs in PEP 376 metadata

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 20 Oct, 2009, at 14:11, Chris Withers wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>> 2) Notice that simplejson gets installed and is a useful module,  
>> then use that in your own scripts
>
> At this point, you specify your scripts' dependencies on simplejson.
>
> Look at it another way:
>
> You follow you process above, but after step 2, your development  
> machine suffers a disk failure so you start from scratch on a new  
> machine.
>
> Are you surprised at this point that simplejson isn't installed when  
> you set things up again, even though by this point you've decided  
> not to use TurboGears?
>
> Code should always specify their dependencies, not doing so will  
> cause you problems down the line...

Sure, and I do that for for any real code. But do you really expect  
that users are careful to specify dependencies for each and every  
script they write.  That may be true for development shops, but I  
don't expect that casual users are so careful.

But this discussion is moot anyway, the proposed metadata is meant to  
help packaging tools to track which packages seem to be orphaned and  
for which they can ask the user if those packages should be removed  
from the system, instead of always removing seemingly orphaned packages.

Ronald
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