[Distutils] PEP for distutils

[Ian Bicking]

Gael Varoquaux wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 04:01:01PM +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
>> That said, I didn't see any indication of what I consider to be a critical 
>> failure in PyPI: No dependency metadata prior to downloading the package.
> 
> +1. I want to be able do list all the packages an easy_install run will
> download without running it. Something like the "-s" option of apt-get.
> In addition, I want this information to be available programmatically (ie
> with a good api, not something that expects to be called from the command
> line) to be able to use it to build dependency graphs, generate conflicts
> list, or simply tell me that I have requested something that is
> impossible.
> 
> There is nothing that I hate more than easy_install failing after having
> half-installed a package because of a missing dependency. This is one of
> the reasons I am never too happy when I have to run easy_install.

FWIW, pyinstall can collect all the packages before installing any of 
them.  You do have to download all packages, though, as that's the only 
way to get the metadata.


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