[Distutils] Reverse dependencies

[Martin Aspeli]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 06:11 PM 5/13/2007 +0100, Martin Aspeli wrote:
>> Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>> At 05:00 PM 5/13/2007 +0100, Martin Aspeli wrote:
>>>> But is there any support for such declarative "reverse" dependencies?
>>> Sort of, in a very limited way.  You'll get a version compatibility
>>> error if you depend on say, Plone<3 and your dependency depends on
>>> Plone>=3.1, for example.  But there's no backtracking to resolve
>>> this, so the minute it happens your installation is basically dead
>>> until you get rid of the problematic package.
>> Comforting. :-)
>>
>> Do you think it'd be a useful feature? I realise it may not be
>> immediately trivial to add. ;)
> 
> No kidding.  I believe it's potentially NP-complete, which is why I 
> only implemented a non-backtracking version that always goes for the 
> highest installed version of each package.
> 
> If somebody else wants to take a look at designing a backtracking 
> algorithm, take a look at the WorkingSet.resolve() method in pkg_resources. 

Well, it may not need to be quite so complex, but it might require some 
new spelling. The idea would be to separate declarative platform support 
from general dependency management (a supported platform may not even be 
a direct dependency, only a "known good" combination).

For example, in your.package (the dependency), we could say:

  supported_platforms=["Plone>=3.0<4", "Zope>=2.10<2.11"]

my.app could say something similar;

  supported_platforms=["Plone>=3.0.1<4", "Zope>=2.10.3<2.11"]

You would only need to look for an overlap in the supported platforms. 
It may be prudent to assume that if a platform wasn't specified, it's 
still OK, i.e. don't fail if you don't know.

Martin