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

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> Piotr Ozarowski wrote:
>>
>> [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()?
>
> How cross platform is that?

near none. I don't see much point in a field for this feature: that's
a typical example where every os vendor is different, and it would
bring more confusion that it worth IMHO.

If there is a need for this feature within tools like buildout or pip,
I think having a wrapped, fake python package for each library works
better (and is actually portable). For helping OS integrators, I think
a readme for packagers is as helpful.

cheers,

David