On Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 6:21 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:
Right, in that case, it would work, but in my experience, it is
important to be able to apply conditionals to more than just
requirements (packages definition and so on).

A significant problem is caused by the allowance of if statements in
setup.py for trying to generically pull data out. Obviously the limited
conditionals of Bento make that easier, but you still need to essentially
maintain a matrix of every possible combination of conditions in order
to accurately represent that data when you don't know what the target
system is going to look at. If other fields benefit from the environment
markers then by all means lets add them to other fields.

A static piece of metadata that is unchanging is a powerful tool on the
index side. It allows some of the current stuff i've been experimenting
with to work very cleanly, such as being able to fetch an entire dependency
tree in one request.

Now again i'm talking solely about the in distribution format and not about
however the tool the developer uses to create creates that file. So for
example bento could easily keep it's conditional based processing of the
info file, it would just need to be smart enough to "compact" it down to the
environment markers in the standard file included with the distribution.