On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:38 PM, zooko
On Sep 29, 2008, at 6:09 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Now, the question is, what would debian miss in here to install:
It really seems to me that PEP-345's specification of dependency metadata is the wrong starting point.
There are not, to my knowledge, any Python packages in existence which use this form of dependency metadata, and there are not, to my knowledge, any Python tools which are capable of producing or consuming it.
In contrast, there are a large number of packages already in existence that declare their dependencies in their EGG-INFO/depends.txt. There are many tools -- I don't even know how many -- which already know how to produce and consume that dependency metadata.
In fact, one such tool has a patch that I contributed myself to use that dependency metadata to automatically produce the Debian "Depends:" information [1]. I learned yesterday that there is a tool by David Malcolm to do likewise for Fedora RPM packages.
We would gain power by continuing to use the format that is already implemented and deployed, instead of asking everyone to switch to a different format.
The point is not to switch to a different format but to make sure: - we are able to read it without a setup.py magic call - we do have everything needed in these metadata for OS-vendors to work with the package otherwise propose some extensions
So it seems like the next step is to write a PEP that supercedes the parts of PEP-345 which are about dependency metadata and instead says that the standard way to encode Python dependency metadata is in the EGG-INFO/requires.txt file.
I would go further and say that we shouldn't have to run a command to generate the EGG-INFO of PKG-INFO or wathever, they should be avalaible in the package, directly, in a flat file. maybe in a "package_info.py" file I don't know or a .cfg file. But we shouldn't depend on a setup.py command call to read them or on a directory built by a command. That is one simple evolution I'd like to propose in the PEP I am working on. Regards,
Regards,
Zooko
[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~astraw/stdeb/autofind-depends --- http://allmydata.org -- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem http://allmydata.com -- back up all your files for $5/month
-- Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/