[Distutils] PEP 345 update + RFC on "Requires-External" and "Requires-Python"

[Piotr Ozarowski]

[Tres Seaver, 2009-11-16]
> >> Values could be things like "libxslt", "libpng", etc..
> > 
> > Am I right in understanding this as informational field only ?
> 
> Yes.  The primary consumers will be OS packagers, who will map them onto
> their own package names.  As with other metadata they care about, we
> hope that the packagers will suggest packages to make these names
> "uniform" acrrss Python distributions.  I imagine there will be some
> jockeying among them to find the "common" name for such things, which
> they will then need to map.

How about putting there what we (distro maintainers) can pass to
ctypes.util.find_library()?

It would be great if there would be another field for build
dependencies, though. F.e. enchant extension required enchant headers to
build enchant.so (so libenchant-dev package was required at build
stage), but now it uses ctypes only and enchant.h is not needed at all.

Previously I used ldd (or dpkg-shlibdeps to be exact) to get runtime
dependencies from .so extension (so once I figured out the right build
dependencies, runtime dependencies were generated automatically),
now I use:

 from ctypes.util import find_library; print find_library("enchant")

to generate right depenencies, but I had to read the sources to figure
out what to pass to find_library.
-- 
Piotr Ożarowski                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer
www.ozarowski.pl          www.griffith.cc           www.debian.org
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