[Distutils] setuptools: package management and explicit version numbers

[Ian Bicking]

Has there been any progress on some of the package management tools 
people were talking about?  I.e., list and delete packages?  (At the 
moment no other features come to mind, but I'm definitely seeing a 
purpose for these functions)  Someone said they were going to give it a 
go, but I can't remember who.

Another option that I think would be useful is to modify requirements in 
a package to make version numbers explicit.  So I might have something 
in development and it requires a bunch of packages.  It just requires 
the Most Recent version of those packages; I haven't tested anything but 
that, so I don't know if older versions would work, and I can't know if 
newer versions will work.

When I get ready to release, I want to be conservative.  Which means 
that I know that the exact versions I am using work well, but nothing 
else; I don't know that past or future versions of the packages I depend 
on will work.  So I'd like to change my requirements so that they 
specify the exact versions I'm using at the time of release.

As I think about it, it sounds pretty easy really.  I just find all the 
requirements, see what version is installed, and rewrite requires.txt 
with those versions.  At first I thought it should be a package 
management function, but should this be part of setuptools?  A new 
command, or maybe an option to egg_info?  It seems like it fits into 
egg_info well.  This means requirements should be specified only in 
requires.txt, not in setup().

There's some other features I can think of specifically using subversion 
together with setuptools, but maybe I'll mull on those a bit longer. 
Nothing fancy, but codifying a specific pattern, something like:

easy_install.py -e -b dev package_name
cd dev/package_name
# I would like "in-development" packages to have some specific version
# but I don't know what that version should be...?
sudo python setup.py develop -m
# time passes, development is done, release is ready...
python setup.py svntag 0.5
# changes PKG-INFO with new version, copies trunk to tags/0.5, does an
# svn switch

huh... maybe I can add such a command with an entry point?

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org