[Distutils] How to get list of package requirements from PyPI without downloading egg?

[Jeremy Kloth]

On Thursday 26 October 2006 9:21 am, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 12:53 AM 10/26/2006 -0600, Jeremy Kloth wrote:
> >On Thursday 26 October 2006 12:21 am, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
> No agreement on semantics simply means that the odds are astronomically 
> against anyone putting in data that can actually be used by someone else.  

As you like to point out so often, I do not actually recall anyone has ever 
brought up the semantics of the fields except yourself whom obviously is 110% 
against them to begin with.

> You would  *first* need to create a tool that could do something useful with 
> the information, 

Done. 4Suite's PackageManager.

> and second, you'd need it to be something that actually  *tested* the 
> usefulness -- meaning you'd need a distutils extension,  

Done. See above.

> or else you'd have to wait until 2.6 to add new features to distutils
> itself.

Hmm, interesting idea. It so happens that I've been using/extending distutils 
since its introduction and am *very* comfortable with its code base. I 
believe that basically an offer to take maintenanceship of it was extended on 
python-dev, this may be something that I will look into. There wouldn't need 
to be wait if distutils itself starting making separate releases again.

> install_requires is set by a script, so the script can set it based on the
> Python version and platform the script is running on.  Thus, eggs built for
> different platforms or Python versions can have different requirements.

And you're telling me that the `requires` argument isn't set by a script?

A platform/version specific dependency issue can only come into play if a 
particular distribution is begin scanned for dependencies out-of-band, which 
is what the OP was talking about, but that is not what is at issue here.

> Until somebody has some idea of 1) what the semantics are, and 2) what the
> use cases for those semantics are, the fields aren't of any value
> whatsoever.  This isn't something that's going to be improved by fiddling
> with their syntax, so long as the semantics remain undefined.

Aparently you haven't used a recent Linux distribution? Both apt or rpm have 
the semantics clearly defined and that is the first thing that came to my 
mind when I came across those fields. Are you sure that you are not just 
against things that are not setuptools?

-- 
Jeremy Kloth
http://4suite.org/