Re: [Distutils] Adding Provides-Extra as an edit to PEP 345

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 11:01:33AM -0400, Éric Araujo wrote:

Hi,

...

Hopefully this will be a more useful spec.

Thanks for the proposal, but it is not really a spec. You’re suggesting name and syntax for a new field, but you don’t describe what it means and what it is used for. From what I understand, the goal is similar to build dependencies and optional dependencies in systems like Debian’s dpkg;

You can also think of extras as similar to Debian's metapackages. For example, looking at the zope.component packaging:

http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/zope.component

The zope.component [zcml] extra is translated to metapackage (python-zope.component-zcml) that depends on python-zope.component and python-zope.configuration.