Status of undocumented distutils features in 2.4?
I was looking up something in the distutils source today, and I noticed that there are some new, undocumented, and not quite complete features that were added earlier this year. Specifically, the 'requires' and 'provides' arguments to 'setup()', and the 'checkdep' command. Should these be removed for 2.4? It doesn't seem likely they'd be able to be fleshed out before the beta, especially since as far as I can recall they haven't been discussed on the Distutils-SIG yet, and some of the features don't seem to be in alignment with the relevant PEPs (e.g. PEP 262's definition of "requires" and "provides"). And, the actual current implementation of the dependency checking is (per the author's comments) "kinda hacky".
On Wednesday 06 October 2004 07:51 pm, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
I was looking up something in the distutils source today, and I noticed that there are some new, undocumented, and not quite complete features that were added earlier this year. Specifically, the 'requires' and 'provides' arguments to 'setup()', and the 'checkdep' command.
Anthony and I threw those together pretty quickly at PyCon; it's not clear that they're useful. For Zope Corp., they won't be. We've decided that we will not be adding __version__ assignments into the codebase, because there lies a stupid maintenance hassle. I have no intention of documenting that stuff myself.
Should these be removed for 2.4?
Yes.
It doesn't seem likely they'd be able to be fleshed out before the beta, especially since as far as I can recall they haven't been discussed on the Distutils-SIG yet, and some of the
Frankly, I have no confidence that we'll ever end up with an agreement on something that's sufficient and still easy to use. Versioning simply isn't any easy aspect of packaging.
features don't seem to be in alignment with the relevant PEPs (e.g. PEP 262's definition of "requires" and "provides"). And, the actual current implementation of the dependency checking is (per the author's comments) "kinda hacky".
You're being generous. ;-) It's unfortunate that PEP 262 was deferred, but that's what happens when no one has time to work on the beast. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
I was looking up something in the distutils source today, and I noticed that there are some new, undocumented, and not quite complete features that were added earlier this year. Specifically, the 'requires' and 'provides' arguments to 'setup()', and the 'checkdep' command.
They were something we worked on at PyCon. In hindsight, they're probably not the right way to go about it, and should be removed. If you want to remove them, great!, otherwise I'll do it in the next day or so. -- Anthony Baxter <anthony@interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
participants (3)
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Anthony Baxter -
Fred L. Drake, Jr. -
Phillip J. Eby