[Distutils] PEP 426 updated based on last round of discussion

[Paul Moore]

On 17 July 2013 12:01, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 16 July 2013 14:40, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The latest version of PEP 426 is up at
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0426/
>
> Just looking at the "Build requires" section I found myself wondering:
> is there any way to say that e.g. a C compiler is required for
> building, or a Fortran compiler or any other piece of software that
> isn't a "Python distribution"?
>
 [...]

> Or perhaps there could be a meta-distribution called "CCompiler" that
> installs MinGW only if the the appropriate MSVC version is not
> available. Or could there be an environment marker to indicate the
> presence of particularly common requirements such as having a C
> compiler?


I can't imagine it's practical to auto-install a C compiler - or even to
check for one before building. But I can see it being useful for
introspection purposes to know about this type of requirement. (A C
compiler could be necessary, or optional for speedups, a particular
external library could be needed, etc)

The data would likely only be as good as what project developers provide,
but nevertheless having standard places to record the data could encourage
doing so...

OTOH, maybe this is metadata 3.0 stuff - I feel like at the moment we need
to get what we have now out of the door rather than continually adding
extra capabilities.

Paul
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