[Distutils] Alternates in SetupTools dependencies?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:26 PM 2/10/2007 -0500, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
>I'm starting to package OpenGLContext as a series of .eggs but I seem to
>be missing something key:
>
>     What's the syntax for declaring "I require numpy or Numeric"
>
>I could declare them as "extras", but it's not that they are
>individually extras, one or the other is *required* for the PyVRML97
>library.  Similar problem with "PyGame or PyGame-ctypes" they are
>work-alikes (or closely enough to use either) and we can work with
>whichever one is installed (preferably choosing the items in order to
>attempt installation).
>
>I don't see any documentation for this (extremely common) case on the
>setuptools page.  Is it just some obvious thing that I'm missing?

No, it's a sometimes-requested feature that can't reasonably be implemented 
in setuptools 0.6.  See this recent thread for more details:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2007-February/007253.html

Interestingly, the numpy vs. Numeric (and/or numarray) use case is the 
specific pair of alternatives that's most often requested by people asking 
for this feature.  :)