[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 9, 2009, at 6:40 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
>
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>> Jim Fulton wrote:
>>>
>>> On Apr 9, 2009, at 12:55 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> I have backed off on the notion of overloading 'Requires:' /
>>>> 'Provides:'
>>>> / 'Obsoletes:', following Jim's notion of deprecating them in favor of
>>>> new fields.  I named them 'Requires-Dist:', 'Provides-Dist:', and
>>>> 'Obsoletes-Dist'.
>>>>
>>>> "Stock" distutils should probably spell the arguments to
>>>> distutils.core.setup predictably:  'requires_dist', 'provides_dist',
>>>> 'obsoletes_dist'.  setuptools can treat 'install_requires' as an
>>>> undeprecated alias for 'requires_dist'.
>>>
>>>
>>> What is the rational for this?  I'd strongly prefer the "requires"
>>> argument name to be compatible with setuptools.  Otherwise, I think
>>> we'll introduce needless confusion.
>>
>> I'm aiming for self-consistency within the 'PKG-INFO' field names:
>>
>> - 'Requires'
>> - 'Requires-Python'
>> - 'Requires-External'
>>
>> The 'Obsoletes' and 'Provides' fields also need
>> distutils-project-oriented versions, so picking a suffix ('-Dist') which
>> matched for them seemed cleanest.
>>
>> Add that to the fact that setuptools has no way (yet) to spell
>> 'provides' or 'obsoletes', and it seemed to me clearer to just make
>> setuptools current argument an alias for the "consistent" version to be
>> landed in distutils.
>
>
> I get that. In fact, I already got that. :) I think backward compatibility
> with existing wide usage is more important and not incompatible.

we could also support both spellings for one version, and deprecate
the old name with a warning,

Tarek