[Distutils] "just use debian"

[Ian Bicking]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> So... that's the kind of thing I encountered with just a couple
>> dependencies, but in practice it was much worse because there were a lot
>> more than 3 libraries involved.  I now think it is best to only use version
>> requirements to express known conflicts.  For future versions of packages
>> you can't really know if they will cause conflicts until they are released.
> 
> Exactly, you can't control everything from your package unless you
> work in an isolated environement like virtualenv or zc.buildout
> provides, so I can't see any solution unless someone is taking care of
> it at a higher level :(
> 
> maybe PyPI though, can automate this, when a package is uploaded, by
> browsing all dependency and
> finding relevant conflict ? PyPI "knows" all the packages out there.
> 
> At least display those conflicts somehow ? or warn about them.

Yes, keeping this version information separate from packages would help, 
I think.  If you find out more information about a conflict it shouldn't 
require a new release -- new releases take a while to do, and have 
cascading effects.  This kind of metadata isn't so much about the 
package, as about how the package relates to other packages.  If we 
could somewhat safely have collaborative conflict information that would 
be nice, though there's different kinds of conflicts so it might be 
infeasible.  It's all too common for a person to just poke around with 
version stuff until something works, but in a way that is only accurate 
for the context of their application, and if they submit that 
information upstream they could easily break other people's setups 
unnecessarily.

-- 
Ian Bicking : ianb at colorstudy.com : http://blog.ianbicking.org