[Distutils] [pyconuk] "just use debian"

[Greg Ewing]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> if you try to
> build a package of baz, there is no way to express correctly that you
> depend on python-bar (>= 1.3) or python-foo (>= 1.2).

Seems to me that baz shouldn't have to say that -- all it
should have to say is that it requires bar version 1.3.
It's up to the package manager to know how to look inside
packages to see what versions of other packages they contain,
if such a thing is going to be allowed.

Otherwise, whenever one package is moved inside another,
then in order to take advantage of that, all other packages
that use it would have to have their dependencies updated,
which doesn't seem reasonable.

I can't see the point of nesting packages like this anyway.
If bar really is usable independently of foo, then why not
just leave it in a separate tar file and let foo declare
a dependency on it?

They can be bundled together for convenience of manual
distribution if desired, but when installed, such a bundle
should be split out into separate packages as far as the
package manager sees them.

If they're being automatically retrieved from a repository,
it makes more sense to keep them separate. There's no
more to download that way, and there may be less, since
you can just download the packages actually needed.

-- 
Greg