-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hey all, I propose adding a bit to the PEP 376 metadata that indicates whether a package was installed by user request or as a dependency of another package. This would allow (un)installer tools to intelligently remove orphaned dependencies, if they so choose. There might be questions about the details of such an uninstaller feature, but I'm not intending to discuss that here. The metadata itself is simple enough to track, and seems like it ought to be included for its future usefulness. I propose adding a metadata file REQUIRED within the .egg-info directory. The presence of this file indicates that the user specifically required this distribution. The absence of the file indicates that the distribution was installed as a dependency. The contents of the file are not used. For the API, I propose adding a "required" property to the Distribution class, which would be True or False based on the presence or absence of the REQUIRED file. I've added a demo implementation to a fork of Tarek's pep376 repo on bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/carljm/pep376/changeset/0c8002e65cb7/ Thoughts? Carl -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iD8DBQFKzhZa1j/fhc23WEARApy3AJ0bbzHBaS85dURlRDEcQOHlrgovXgCg022F OkpQ56+Re1yRnoNFfFNYm88= =nkMB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----