[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[PJ Eby]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see it as more useful for making an executable optional by defining a
> "cli" extra. If your project just gets installed as a dependency, no wrapper
> would get generated.
>
> Only if you went "pip install myproject[cli]" (or another project
> specifically depended on the cli extra) would it be installed.

Why stop there...  how about environment markers for exports, too?
;-)  And throw in an environment marker syntax for whether something
was installed as a dependency or explicitly...  ;-)

(Btw, the above is a change from setuptools semantics, but I don't
really see it as a problem; ISTM unlikely that anybody has used extras
on a script wrapper.  Extras on *other* entry points, however, *do*
exist, at least IIRC.  I'm pretty sure there was at least one concrete
use case for them involving Chandler plugins when I originally
implemented the feature.  The possibility of having extras on a script
is just a side effect, though, not an actually-intended feature; if
you have the need, it actually makes more sense to just bundle the
script in another package and require that pacakge from the extra,
rather than putting it in the original package.)