[Distutils] distlib updated - comments sought

[Daniel Holth]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I'm basing this only on Vinay's numbers of
>> how-many-packages-can-generate-a-yaml. It's probably mostly packages
>> that import something he didn't have installed inside setup.py, but I
>> don't have a good way to find out exactly what is wrong with each one.
>> An awful lot of packages do work fine; I don't have an automated way
>> to detect that either.
>
> See this gist of the current crop of errors:
>
> https://gist.github.com/3841557
>
> There are 1609 lines, after processing 17956 PyPI archives. Of the failures,
> 306 are because the source archive I generated from package.yaml didn't match
> the results of "python setup.py sdist". The remaining 1303 are failures to
> generate package.yaml. A depressing number are because the packagers failed to
> include files like 'README.rst' or 'CHANGES' in the distribution, but setup.py
> bails if they aren't there.
>
> Some of these will be false positives, i.e. bugs in my code. But many of the
> ones I've investigated hold up as a problem with the archive on PyPI.

Neat.

Packages that forgot to include README.rst in the sdist aren't that
interesting. Tragic though.

What would be really cool would be a web interface to all the setup.py
on pypi. Detect whether the sdist definitely does not use conditional
dependencies and ignore. If it might use conditional dependencies,
interested Pythoneers read setup.py and type them in. Installer checks
out of band metadata to install the build deps and make better
decisions about the regular deps.