[Distutils] something else to throw into the static metadata mix

[cgalvan at mail.utexas.edu]

Quoting Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>:

> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Chris Withers   
> <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>>
>>> I think it's another issue, more related to the way easy_install or
>>> pip works with PyPI
>>> (using package_index.py)
>>
>> I think you're missing my point: how would the package be named and/or how
>> would you express in static metadata, that a particular version of the
>> package is for postgres 8 rather than postgres 7, or 8.4 rather than 8.3?
>
> But it's out of the scope of the static metadata  to describe these
> system dependencies :
> the dependencies are only *python* dependencies, so the micro-language
> we will provide does only concerns the Python environment.

I agree with Tarek that the system dependency handling is not  
something that should be dealt with in the python package metadata.   
The best thing that can be hoped for is that packages which rely on a  
specific version of a system dependency will throw a descriptive error  
indicating this particular problem.  The MySQL_python project is one  
example of a project that is already doing this, since they throw an  
ImportError with a descriptive title in this case.

-Chris

>
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> --
>> Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting
>>           - http://www.simplistix.co.uk
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org | オープンソースはすごい!
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