[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[Marius Gedminas]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 10:49:36PM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> > Marius Gedminas wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 09:19:13AM -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
> > >> There is one more new
> > >> argument to setup() we should consider, which might be spelled
> > >> 'build_requires', and which would map onto the 'Requires-External'
> > >> PKG-INFO field.
> > > Setuptools has a 'setup_requires' argument to setup().  I don't know if
> > > the semantics of that one are similar to your proposed 'build_requires'.
> >
> > Nope:  'build_requires' is something Matthias Klose discussed as being
> > useful for downstream packagers:  it doesn't refer to Python
> > distributions, but to external library / tool requriements.
> 
> It could still be useful to python as well, for a potential future tool.
> That's very useful for bootstrapping packages, for example, so it is not
> just for downstream packagers.
> 
> @Marius: build-requires spells out the dependencies necessary to *build*
> the concerned package, but which are not necessary to *use* the package.
> For example, a python package foo requires paver to be built correctly,
> but you can use foo in your own code without paver.

And that's exactly how setup_requires differs from install_requires,
which prompted my question. ;-)

Tres's answer explains it all (except for the syntax, which I should go
and look up if I'm interested, I suppose).

Marius Gedminas
-- 
This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.
                -- Douglas Hofstadter
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