At 10:04 PM 7/23/2007 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
But by definition, the people typing the names of the dependencies into a 'setup.py' for such a plugin *are* Python programmers, and could be expected to know about case sensitivity.
I don't think Jim was areguing that human-centric *search* should punish misspellings, but rather that encouraging such sloppiness in other packages is a misfeature, especially if supporting it induces a tax on *all* users of automated dependency resolution.
Right. I think Phillip is primarily talking about package names as specified on the command line of easy_install.
So if your concern is about package names specified in dependencies, one solution could be that setuptools distinguishes whether to apply case corrections and normalization, depending on whether it was an end-user-typed name or a programmer-specified one.
What I don't know is how difficult that would be to implement, and what volunteer is supposed to implement it if it were easy/possible, so I by no means propose that such a solution should be implemented, even if it would solve the problem.
Yes, especially since compatibility with the existing installation base requires case insensitivity, because on case-insensitive platforms easy_install already normalizes the case of filenames it creates. So, the question of what the "right thing" to do is in the abstract has already been moot for a year or two.