[Distutils] 70 packages in total use setuptools' "extras" feature

[Attila Oláh]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 20:05, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 10:21 AM 12/3/2009 -0800, Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:
>>
>>  Do you have anything particular in mind? What I did was a ``grep
>> "^.*[a-zA-Z]\["`` in the requires.txt of (almost) all the packages in PyPI.
>
> Do note that this won't tell you about end users' use of extras.
>
> The main use case described in the documentation for extras is allowing
> users to install optional support for things.  That means you're more likely
> to see them in buildout configurations (which won't be found on PyPI), and
> manual installation steps (which aren't recorded anywhere).

I have to agree with that. One common example are packages that use
PasteScript/PasteDeploy and different configuration for development
and deployment, putting only the configuration files (etc/*.ini) in
the extras, so installing a deployment-version of the package wold
only require installing the "deploy" extra.

Another example is putting all the test files in the "test" extra,
which is almost never required as a dependency, but is used by
buildbots, developers, etc.