Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
If you don't have Provides-Dist, then distribute must continue to bundle an extra .egg-info directory to emulate the feature. This is more than enough justification for me. Name: is essentially an alias for Provides-Dist: (or vice-versa) so there is no such thing as a single-valued Provides-Dist. Having two names for a package is just as complicated as having twenty.
I'm not so sure. In the case of two names, it could be assumed that one was a fork of the other (as in the specific cases of distribute/setuptools, or PIL/ Pillow). You cannot reasonably make this assumption if you have twenty entries in your Provides-Dist.
You should not implement Provides-Dist by searching for every Provides-Dist: name on PyPI.
I wasn't seriously suggesting that this approach be taken - merely pointing out that Provides-Dist isn't of much use in a metadata index.
should only use it when deciding whether to download setuptools when distribute is already installed and a package depends on setuptools.The bundling term was bad wording on the part of the PEP. No one should ever include non-renamed copies of other dists in their dists "import six" vs. "import django.util.six". I've suggested a new wording in this thread.
So apart from the setuptools/distribute and PIL/Pillow scenarios, what are the scenarios where you would have 3 or more values in Provides-Dist? If they are e.g. a bundled SQLAlchemy, why would that be preferable to an entry in Requires-Dist? Regards, Vinay Sajip