On 17 February 2017 at 08:56, Nick Coghlan
- we retain full control over the tone of the error notification
I tried to formulate a long response to this email, and got completely bogged down. So I'm going to give a brief[1] response for now and duck out until the dust settles. By "we" above, I assume you mean distutils-sig/PyPA. As part of that group, I find the complexities of how distributions package stuff up, and the expected interactions of the multitude of parties involved in the model you describe, completely baffling. That's fine normally (as a Windows developer, I don't typically interact with Linux distributions) but when it comes to being part of distutils-sig/PyPA in terms of how we present things like this, I feel a responsibility to understand (and by proxy, represent users who are similarly unaware of distro practices, etc). I understand (somewhat) the motivations behind this distinction between "requires" and "integrates"[2] but I think we need to come up with a much more straightforward explanation - geared towards library authors who don't understand (and probably aren't that interested in) the underling issues - before we standardise anything. Because otherwise, we'll be rehashing this debate over and over as library authors get errors they don't understand, and come asking. Paul [1] Yes, this was as brief as I could manage :-( [2] As a data point, I couldn't even think of the right terms to use here without scanning back over the email thread to look for them. That indicates to me that the concepts are anything but intuitive :-(