* Provides a mapping between python project names and Debian binary/source package names * Converts setuptools versions to Debian versions while maintaining sort order * Can introspect an .egg-info directory to figure out the Debian dependencies for use in the debian/control file. It can also handle/understand extras (I Hope!)
I looked briefly at this code, and it appears that it is doing purely syntactic mapping between Debian package names and Python distribution names, for example: def py_to_bin(setuptools_project): """Convert a setuptools project name to a debian binary package name""" return _PY_TO_BIN.get(setuptools_project, 'python-%s' % setuptools_project.lower()) This works most of the time, but it isn't reliable. For example, the module name is "OpenSSL", the distribution name is "pyOpenSSL", and the Debian package name is "python-openssl": http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/python-openssl/filelist That's why I contributed a patch to stdeb which uses the Debian database of which files are included in which packages (the same database that generates the web page linked above): http://github.com/astraw/stdeb/blob/ 647dd441a1712f8df37b5f7f5ba22ab6aeb2c3e7/stdeb/util.py#L135 The way stdeb does it looks in the database for files named "$DISTRIBUTION-$VERSION-py$PYTHONVERSION.egg-info". The Debian package that includes such a file is the Debian package that you need to install in order to satisfy a dependency on $DISTRIBUTION, $VERSION. This works regardless of whether the Python package is built with distutils or setuptools, and indeed it works for all packages that I know of. (There is actually one exception: the Debian package for setuptools itself doesn't include a version number in its .egg-info filename: http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/python-setuptools/filelist It has a file named: /usr/share/pyshared/setuptools.egg-info/ I guess we should add a fall-back-with-warning behavior to stdeb that if it can't find "$DISTRIBUTION-$VERSION.egg-info", but it can find "$DISTRIBUTION.egg-info", then it should (optionally) assume that the Debian package that has that file will satisfy the requirement, regardless of the version number in the requirement. That, or someone should open a ticket asking Debian to add a version number to that filename. The exact regexp is currently: egginfore=("(/(%s)(?:-[^/]+)?(?:-py[0-9]\.[0-9.]+)?\.egg-info)" % '|'.join(req.project_name for req in requirements)) If you would be interested in including this mechanism to query the database in van.pydeb, I would be happy to advise you. Regards, Zooko