[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Vinay Sajip]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> On 22 Jul 2013 01:46, "PJ Eby" <pje <at> telecommunity.com> wrote:

> > To put it another way, it's not "exported only if extra is available",
> > it's "exported, but make sure you have this first."  A subtle
> > difference, but important to the original use cases (see below).
> Ah, yes, I see the distinction (and it does make this notion conceptually
simpler).

Does "make sure you have this first" mean "install this if it's not present"
or "raise an exception if it's not present"? AFAICT PEP 376 does not
consider extras at all, and so does not have any standard way to store which
extras a distribution was installed with. So what's the standard way of
testing if "extra is available"?

Regards,

Vinay Sajip