[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[Tres Seaver]

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Antonio Cavallo wrote:

> I might be late and I haven't been to pycon but I've noted in this
> pep 345:
> 
> It is an attempt to re-invent the rpm spec file?

No, it is an attempt to provide Python-specific information about a
package in a machine-readable format, which doesn't require running
'setup()'.  This information will be present in 'sdist' and 'bdist*'
archives, as well as in installed packages.

Once landed, we can look at how layers like setuptools, as well as the
catalog (PyPI) can exploit this information.

> In this case how would you plan to integrate with the rpms dependecies?

Not at all.  There is no guarantee that we know about or can satisfy the
policies of arbitrary distributions.   We hope that adding dependency
information which is targeted at distributions rather than importable
packages / modules will make life easier for the folks who package our
distributions as .rpm, .deb, etc.  E.g., packagers might be able to
write tools which query this data and then generate the files which
match their policies, mapping distribution names, etc.

Note that PEP 314, which is already landed, added dependency-related
fields ('Requires', 'Provides', 'Obsoletes') but specified a semantic
for them which is not as useful (the names in those fields are supposed
to be names of importable packages or modules, rather than distutils
project names).  There are some packages in PyPI already which spell
these fields, but there is no practical way to *use* them in any
automated way.


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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