[Distutils] questions on setuptools

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:01 PM 4/23/2008 -0600, Michael Hearne wrote:
>Phillip - Thanks for the quick response.  One feature suggestion for
>the future:
>
> From my perhaps naive perspective, it seems like it would be easy to
>add non-PyPI dependencies that the installer could complain about.
>For example, if the setup() function accepted a keyword list that
>contained just the name of the package (whatever you use to import
>it), and then have the installer do something like this:
>
>deps = ['foo','bar'] (this is the keyword list passed to the setup
>function)
>notfound = []
>for dep in deps:
>         try:
>                 __import__(dep)
>         except:
>                 notfound.append(dep)
>         if notfound:
>                 print 'The following required packages are not 
> installed.  Exiting.'
>% (str(notfound))
>                 sys.exit(1)

I don't think this is a significant enough improvement over the 
package aborting at runtime, to add the complexity.  Plus, it removes 
the incentive for the depender to lobby the dependee to make their 
package easy_install-able.  :)

(And, it's actually more complex if you're trying to do version 
detection as well as presence detection.  There's some old code in 
setuptools.depends that tries to do this sort of thing, but I 
abandoned that approach many years ago.)