[Distutils] PEP 345 update + RFC on "Requires-External" and "Requires-Python"

[Tres Seaver]

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Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
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>> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>
>>>> near none. I don't see much point in a field for this feature: that's
>>>> a typical example where every os vendor is different, and it would
>>>> bring more confusion that it worth IMHO.
>>> I agree.
>>>
>>> And I can think about a few scenarii where the names managment at PyPI
>>> will be a nightmare.
>>>
>>> The PyPI manager will have to decide unilaterally the names to keep,
>>> the names to change,  and he will need to maintain aliases for names
>>> that points to the same lib, to make both camps happy,
>>> and possibly keep backward compatibilities for those names.
>>>
>>> I am proposing to remove the Requires-External completely from PEP
>>> 345, unless someone wants it badly. (And he/she will need to go into
>>> greater details in these scenarii)
>> - -1. I don't see a problem keeping it:  it is "advisory" only.  PyPI is
>> not a consumer of this field, and should *not* be doing any enforcement
>> / normalization / mapping of its values.
> 
> In that case, I am not sure to see what's the point of keeping an
> external reference registery at PyPI,
> as a free place where anyone can put anything. The only gain I was
> seeing it normalization.
> 
> If no normalization is done, then a plain README.txt file with this
> info in the project itself is sufficient,  or maybe making the field
> hold these (name, description, url) info directly.

This isn't *about* PyPI:  it is about putting the information in a
standard place for downstream packagers (*they* requested it).  PyPI
should either ignore the field or just pass it through untouched:
downstream packagers are going to examine the PKG_INFO file in the
tarball they work with, and might write scripts which do the mapping of
the machine-readable file to their own dependency names.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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