2009/9/30 Sridhar Ratnakumar <sridharr@activestate.com>
On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:26:15 -0700, <cgalvan@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

I agree with Tarek that the system dependency handling is not something that should be dealt with in the python package metadata.  The best thing that can be hoped for is that packages which rely on a specific version of a system dependency will throw a descriptive error indicating this particular problem.  The MySQL_python project is one example of a project that is already doing this, since they throw an ImportError with a descriptive title in this case.

The other option could be to enable support for static linking so as to make the egg a reasonably self-sufficient binary (eg: lxml's --static flag to setup.py)
 
Just to throw more in the mix -- this option is totally ad hoc in lxml, which means it's hard to handle in an installer like easy_install or pip.  That is, there's no good way to do "easy_install --static lxml" (it's more possible in pip, but still quite awkward).

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Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org  |  http://topplabs.org/civichacker