On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Ram Rachum <cool-rr@cool-rr.com> wrote: [..]
I haven't investigated that egg-info thing, because it doesn't matter much to me what is the technical reason for this. The fact that `require` gave a false positive, and not even under any special circumstances, just a standard Windows installation of wxPython, is reason enough not to use it in my project.
What is your Python version ? Starting at Python 2.5, all distutils-based installers add an egg-info file or folder alongside the packages it installs in your system. If it's not present it could be a partial installation, or a bug. I would be interested in your feedback if you do investigate some more.
Also, before I came to this conclusion I noticed the kind of error that pkg_resources raises:
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: my-dependency
That is not too helpful. Yes, I noticed you have a todo comment on that error to make it more informative:
raise DistributionNotFound(req) # XXX put more info here
So here's a patch for you:
raise DistributionNotFound('''The distribution %s is needed for this \ program, but it was not found on this system. Please search for it on the \ internet, then download and install it, then try this program again.''' % req)
Because when a potential user has just downloaded my program and he's trying it out, the last thing I want to do is scare him away with an obscure error message.
Sure, that's helpfull. I am adding this in Distribute, for the 0.6.9 upcoming release. Tarek