Re: [Distutils] C extension dependencies

On 11 September 2014 18:48, Donald Stufft wrote:

On Sep 11, 2014, at 4:37 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

On 11 September 2014 08:15, Donald Stufft wrote:

Perhaps the gains wouldn’t be worth the complexity though and it’d just be easier to allow projects to have a build hint thing that gets printed if the build fails.

Putting it in core pip sounds to me like a recipe for endless system-specific hacks, TBH. Having a plugin system that allowed external packages to add (and maintain!) system-specific checks might work, but that's pretty complex.

Paul

Yes to be specific the only thing I would personally be OK with adding to the pip core is something that added the appropiate hooks to let some other thing provide the platform specific mechanisms. I'm still not sure it's worth the effort over the simpler idea of just providing a build_hint metadata that authors can use to say "Hey you need to isntall libxml2 for this thing" or whatever.

It actually occurs to me that the GNU autoconf directory scheme may be useful here - if people define their dependencies in terms of that scheme, it should be possible for a plugin to figure out how to ask the OS installer for them, or otherwise check for them in a virtualenv or conda environment. And, if no such plugin is available, the fallback option would be to just tell the user what's missing. (FWIW, the only major barrier I see to formalising the metadata 2.0 spec at this point is the lack of up to date jsonschema files. Getting that out the door may be something to explore post pip 1.6) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia