[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[David Cournapeau]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> Marius Gedminas wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 09:19:13AM -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
> >> There is one more new
> >> argument to setup() we should consider, which might be spelled
> >> 'build_requires', and which would map onto the 'Requires-External'
> >> PKG-INFO field.
> > Setuptools has a 'setup_requires' argument to setup().  I don't know if
> > the semantics of that one are similar to your proposed 'build_requires'.
>
> Nope:  'build_requires' is something Matthias Klose discussed as being
> useful for downstream packagers:  it doesn't refer to Python
> distributions, but to external library / tool requriements.

It could still be useful to python as well, for a potential future tool.
That's very useful for bootstrapping packages, for example, so it is not
just for downstream packagers.

@Marius: build-requires spells out the dependencies necessary to *build*
the concerned package, but which are not necessary to *use* the package.
For example, a python package foo requires paver to be built correctly,
but you can use foo in your own code without paver.

cheers,

David