[Numpy-discussion] [SciPy-dev] Announcing toydist, improving distribution and packaging situation

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 11:32:00AM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
> [snip]
>   - supporting different variants of the same package in the
> dependency graph at install time

> [snip]

> The second issue is more challenging. It complicates the dependency
> handling quite a bit, and may cause difficult situations to happen at
> dependency resolution time. This becomes particularly messy if you mix
> packages you build yourself with packages grabbed from a repository. I
> wonder if there is a simpler solution which would give a similar
> feature set.


AFAICT, in Debian, the same feature is given via virtual packages: you
would have:

python-matplotlib
python-matplotlib-basemap

for instance.

It is interesting to note that the same source package may be used to
generate both binary, end-user, packages.

And happy new year!

Gaël