Chris Withers wrote:

David Lyon wrote:

...

On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:18:50 +0100, Chris Withers wrote:

...

<mini rant> If Python had a packaging system *and* used it for the standard library, then things like this wouldn't be a problem... The setup.cfg could just say "requires sqlite greater than version x.y.z", and if it was in the standard library, it would be used unless a newer version was needed.

+1

Actually, this was already discussed on this mailing list.

Yeah, I know, but I had memories of it be poo-poo'ed on Python-Dev... (CC'ing so they can tell me I'm wrong ;-) )

My recollection of the python-dev discussions was that the outcome was "there isn't even a distutils-sig consensus yet, so it's a little early for python-dev to be sticking its oar in". Also, I don't think providing new metadata *describing* the standard library was particularly controversial - it was more radical ideas of actually breaking up the core distro into separate components that met resistance. Third party installers having the power to easily "replace" standard library modules for more than a single application was also a heavily debated feature (since that way lies unintended coupling and application/library installations that break previously installed applications). It's probably also worth mentioning that on many of these topics there is a recurring communications gap that usually becomes painful for the distutils-sig side as core devs re-ask questions that were hashed out on the distutils list long before. So I would suggest being prepared to summarise and provide links to such discussions when this all becomes settled enough to bring back to the whole of python-dev. The back and forth of an archived mailing list discussion can sometimes be more persuasive than the relatively sanitised summaries that end up in a PEP :) That said, Tarek's response suggests that this still isn't ready for a wider python-dev discussion, so I've set followup-to accordingly. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------