[Distutils] [RFC] Recentering the static metadata need : PKG-INFO

[David Lyon]

On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:41:52 +0900, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>>> 'if desktop in "gnome|windows"' etc
> 
> Agreed, this is too fragile and complicated. 

I don't understand which part is fragile.

Detecting if gnome or windows exists? or implementing this via Tareks
proposal (sort of shown as best as I understand it above).

My proposal has always been:

[dependencies windows]
packages = win32com

If you are really suggesting that detecting windows is so fragile
that it really shouldn't be supported I really don't have much
further to say. 

Windows is fragile... linux is fragile.. python packaging is
fragile.. 

> At least for things like platform, arch and os, things are quite stable.

Ok, so you agree with everything up to defining the window manager.

That's good.

Detecting the actual window manager is a fairly trivial detail. In reality.

> For everything else, either there is a way to define our own variable
> whose values are handled by outside code (say setup.py or command line),
> or you don't make them available at all in the static file. I don't see
> other solution, and the packaging solutions I know do not allow this
> kind of things. For any new feature in distutils, it should almost be
> mandatory to look at what other people did to the same problem space.
> Good design only comes with experience in that space domain, IMO.

I do many desktop software installs.

I have a good working knowledge of the issues.

Ok - I'm agreeing. So lets make all the python packaging as good as
it is in perl.

Really, you're only objection comes down to the tags 'gnome' and
'kde' if I'm not mistaken. To me they aren't big issues. Ok, so
we have to ommit 4 lines of code. I'm not bothered.

David