[Distutils] current preferred way to specify dependencies? future?

[John Gabriele]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 10:44 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at preisshare.net> wrote:
>
> Hi John,
>
>> What is expected to be the standard way to do this in the near future?
>
> PEP-345 says:
>
>  > Requires-Dist: pywin32 (>1.0); sys.platform == 'win32'
>  > Obsoletes-Dist: pywin31; sys.platform == 'win32'
>  > Requires-Dist: foo (1,!=1.3); os.machine == 'i386'
>  > Requires-Dist: bar; python_version == '2.4' or python_version == '2.5'
>  > Requires-External: libxslt; 'linux' in sys.platform
>
> To me that's really confusing.

I'm a bit confused myself... PEP-345 says it "describes a mechanism
for adding metadata to Python packages", but I think they really mean
"distributions" (the things available at the PyPI).

Also, it looks like pep345 describes what fields can go into a
PKG-INFO file, but not how you get them in there. AFAIK, I'm not
supposed to write my own PKG-INFO file -- setup.py does it for me.
What I'm really asking about here is, what args go in the `setup()`
call in the `setup.py` file?

If my FooBar-0.1.0 distribution depends upon packages and modules in
CoolStuff-2.0.0 and ReallyNeatStuff-1.5.5, what's the current best way
to say so, and what's going to be the standard going forward?

Thanks,
---John