[Distutils] Should metadata known about compatibility?

[Hanno Schlichting]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Hanno Schlichting <hannosch at hannosch.eu> wrote:
>> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:07 PM, Hanno Schlichting <hannosch at hannosch.eu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to suggest that distutils metadata should gain a way of
>>>> specifying compatibility with packages in addition to the requirement of
>>>> packages.
> 
> I think the classifiers works pretty well there. (If we look at your use cases,
> and the classifiers browsing features at PyPI)

Right, it seems to be a bit of an abuse to use classifiers which include
version numbers, but it might work well enough.

What I care most about is to have a defined way of stating this
information, so we can build tools on top of it.

I'd like to have Plone get the ability to get a button saying "Check for
upgrade" which can produce a version list of locally installed packages,
post them to a service at plone.org and get back a result saying:
"There's a new version of Plone out, but 3 of your 9 installed plug-ins
are not yet available for this version."

> The only problem I can see is the fact that they have to be added "manually"
> at PyPI.  If we put apart this problem, do you see any remaining problem ?

Yes, but this might just as well be solved by documenting the procedure
for requesting new classifiers clearly.

Hanno