<html><body><div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><hr id="zwchr"><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #1010FF;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><br class=""><div><blockquote class=""><div class="">On Sep 11, 2014, at 4:37 AM, Paul Moore <<a href="mailto:p.f.moore@gmail.com" class="" target="_blank">p.f.moore@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">On 11 September 2014 08:15, Donald Stufft <<a href="mailto:donald@stufft.io" class="" target="_blank">donald@stufft.io</a>> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote class="">Perhaps the gains wouldn’t be worth the complexity though and it’d<br class="">just be easier to allow projects to have a build hint thing that gets<br class="">printed if the build fails.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Putting it in core pip sounds to me like a recipe for endless<br class="">system-specific hacks, TBH. Having a plugin system that allowed<br class="">external packages to add (and maintain!) system-specific checks might<br class="">work, but that's pretty complex.<br class=""><br class="">Paul<br class=""></div></blockquote></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">Yes to be specific the only thing I would personally be OK with adding to the</div><div class="">pip core is something that added the appropiate hooks to let some other thing</div><div class="">provide the platform specific mechanisms. I'm still not sure it's worth the</div><div class="">effort over the simpler idea of just providing a build_hint metadata that</div><div class="">authors can use to say "Hey you need to isntall libxml2 for this thing" or</div><div class="">whatever.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>While working on packaging Ruby and Rubygems for Fedora, we actually used a Rubygems hook to create a plugin that did precisely this, it's called gem-nice-install [1] (we did use it for some time, but I'm not sure whether it's still being actively developed and used)<br></div><div>We actually went a step further and implemented the *actual installation* in that plugin (sending list of packages to install to PackageKit via dbus) and it worked really nice.<br></div><div>I think allowing plugins is much better than providing build hint, because build hint may not give you information about *what* (different distros name some packages differently), but most importantly *how* the missing packages should be installed. And IMO upstreams shouldn't care about this (they shouldn't *need* to care), this is the work of distro packagers. So I vote for plugins.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks,<br></div><div>Slavek<br></div><div><br></div><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #1010FF;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><div class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">---</div><div class="">Donald Stufft</div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>[1] https://github.com/voxik/gem-nice-install</div></div></body></html>