[Distutils] Upcoming changes to PEP 426/440

[Vinay Sajip]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Donald has been continuing his data modelling work for Warehouse (aka
> PyPI 2.0: https://github.com/dstufft/warehouse) and found that the
> *_requires/*_may_require split for dependencies was significantly more
> painful to work with than I had expected.

Has there been any public discussion about this? I'm just curious about what
the difficulties were.

> 1. The "*_may_require" fields are all going away (leaving only the
> "*_requires" fields)
> 
> 2. The "*_requires" fields are becoming lists of "dependency
> specifier" mappings rather than strings

I'm wondering if this area could be simplified further. For example, can't
we lose test_requires, meta_requires, build_requires and dev_requires just
by stating that "test", "meta", "build" and "dev" are reserved extra names
which don't need to be explicitly defined in "extras"? Then you get just one
list of dependency specifiers, which can be readily filtered to provide what
is currently provided by {test,meta,build,dev}_requires. It seems to lead to
a very simple data model, as well as making the JSON schema more concise.
 
Regards,

Vinay Sajip