[Python-Dev] splitting out bdist_*

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eric Smith writes:

 > I was just pointing out that bdist_rpm has users, and it's not likely to 
 > be abandoned.

OK, I see.  I don't think there's a reason to remove useful
functionality from the stdlib, unless it's clearly superseded by a
similar module.

 > I don't see how they differ. It's definitely true that packagers using 
 > the same tool might want to produce different package layouts and no 
 > doubt other differences. I don't see why it wouldn't be easy to have 
 > these differences driven by different policies acting on the same 
 > metadata, or small amounts of custom (per-packager) metadata.

My experience in XEmacs has been that Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo,
SuSE, and Mandriva have rather different expressions of things like
dependencies, and they tend to have different ideas of how forceful
they should be with any given supporting package (when the package
system supports different strengths of dependency).

Debian, for example, supports "predepends" (you can't even install the
dependent unless the prerequisite is already installed), "depends"
(installing the dependent will also install the prerequisite unless
the admin is quite forceful about saying no), "recommends" (it's easy
to say no), and "suggests" (you only get a message saying "Things go
better with Coke" and a suggestion that you may want to install Coke
because you installed Things).  In other systems there's either a
dependency, or there isn't.  Gentoo has "use flags" which are about as
flexible as Debian dependencies, but their taste in recommendations is
quite different.

I really don't see how that kind of thing can be easily supported by a
Python module maintainer, unless they're also the downstream packager.