[Distutils] [pyconuk] "just use debian"

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:38 PM, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> On Sep 29, 2008, at 6:09 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>
>> Now, the question is,  what would debian miss in here to install:
>>
>> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0345/
>
> It really seems to me that PEP-345's specification of dependency metadata is
> the wrong starting point.
>
> There are not, to my knowledge, any Python packages in existence which use
> this form of dependency metadata, and there are not, to my knowledge, any
> Python tools which are capable of producing or consuming it.
>
> In contrast, there are a large number of packages already in existence that
> declare their dependencies in their EGG-INFO/depends.txt.  There are many
> tools -- I don't even know how many -- which already know how to produce and
> consume that dependency metadata.
>
> In fact, one such tool has a patch that I contributed myself to use that
> dependency metadata to automatically produce the Debian "Depends:"
> information [1].  I learned yesterday that there is a tool by David Malcolm
> to do likewise for Fedora RPM packages.
>
> We would gain power by continuing to use the format that is already
> implemented and deployed, instead of asking everyone to switch to a
> different format.

The point is not to switch to a different format but to make sure:

- we are able to read it without a setup.py magic call
- we do have everything needed in these metadata for OS-vendors to
work with the package
  otherwise propose some extensions

>
> So it seems like the next step is to write a PEP that supercedes the parts
> of PEP-345 which are about dependency metadata and instead says that the
> standard way to encode Python dependency metadata is in the
> EGG-INFO/requires.txt file.
>

I would go further and say that we shouldn't have to run a command
to generate the EGG-INFO of PKG-INFO or wathever,

they should be avalaible in the package, directly, in a flat file.

maybe in a "package_info.py" file I don't know or a .cfg file. But we
shouldn't depend
on a setup.py command call to read them or on  a directory built by a command.

That is one simple evolution I'd like to propose in the PEP I am
working on.


Regards,


> Regards,
>
> Zooko
>
> [1] https://code.launchpad.net/~astraw/stdeb/autofind-depends
> ---
> http://allmydata.org -- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem
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-- 
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/