[Distutils] PEP for specifying build dependencies

[Robert Collins]

On 12 May 2016 at 08:46, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>> On May 11, 2016, at 4:27 PM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
>>
>>> probably too late or out of scope for this pep. However the distro packaging
>>> for python packages recommends to run the testsuite during the package
>>> build. Would it be possible to extend this pep to test depends, or maybe
>>> track this as a separate pep?
>>
>> It's covered as well- this is general purpose 'what is needed to run
>> setup.py' - once you can run setup.py, you can machine interrogate any
>> further dependencies.
>
>
> It’s not *exactly* covered— I mean people could stick test dependencies in
> this new field but I don’t think that setuptools actually exposes the
> test_requires in any meaningful way (nor do I think people actually use
> setuptools test support that consistently). So setuptools could get better
> support for testing dependencies independently of this PEP *or* another PEP
> could add a similar section that layered ontop of this. It’s definitely out
> of scope for this particular PEP though.

Right - in more detail though:
tox using projects:
 - set it to setuptools, wheel and any other 'needed to run setup.py
sdist' things. Then tox will work - and its list is generally plain
text that packagers can introspect, install separately and run the tox
commands directly.

setup.py test using projects:
 -  a small setuptools entrypoint can be written to allow
introspecting test_requires, so we just need to set the requires as
for the tox case

etc.

-Rob


-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hpe.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud