[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Paul Moore]

On 15 February 2017 at 15:50, Freddy Rietdijk <freddyrietdijk at fridh.nl> wrote:
> It's quite frustrating as a downstream having to deal with packages where
> versions are pinned unnecessarily and therefore I've also requested on the
> Setuptools tracker a flag that ignores constraints [1] (though I fear I
> would have to pull up my sleeves for this one :) ) .

Sort of repeating my earlier question, but how often does this happen
in reality? (As a proportion of the packages you deal with). And how
often is it that a simple request/PR to the package author to remove
the explicit version requirements is rejected? (I assume your first
response is to file an issue with upstream?)

If you *do* get in a situation where the package explicitly requires
certain versions of its dependencies, and you ignore those
requirements, then presumably you're taking responsibility for
supporting a combination that the upstream author doesn't support. How
do you handle that?

I'm not trying to pick on your process here, or claim that
distributions are somehow doing things wrongly. But I am trying to
understand what redistributors' expectations are of package authors.
Nick said he wants to guide authors away from explicit version
pinning. That's fine, but is the problem so big that the occasional
bug report to offending projects saying "please don't pin exact
versions" is insufficient guidance?

Paul