On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.bray@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 5:35 PM, PJ Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It looks like you can only install one extra at a time,
>
>
> Actually, you can specify more than one, using commas. e.g. "easy_install
> foo[testing,c-extensions,celery-support,...]".

Would we want this to look the same way for pysetup? Something like
`pysetup install foo[tests,docs]`? That would be a pretty nice way to
handle docs, tests, and other miscellaneous extra requirements. I
like the idea of using environment markers for that and not having to
add any new metadata fields.

Using an environment marker might also work for some kind of
build-requires, though support for that would still require some
special machinery.

Since I haven't used pysetup yet, I couldn't really say. I can say that some people have mentioned that they find setuptools' "extras" mechanism to be confusing, unnecessary, or a tool in search of a usecase. I'm not terribly attached to them, but I prefer them to the solution that e.g. Celery uses. Celery has various dummy distributions on PyPI like "celery-with-couchdb" that exist only to pull in extras, and it only needs them because some packaging tools don't support extras. (ISTR that pip doesn't support them.)