[Distutils] Deprecate and Block requires/provides

[Donald Stufft]

On Oct 17, 2013, at 7:14 AM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> So what I would like to do is "remove" these fields. This would consist
>> of modifying PyPI to return an error code if they are included and hiding
>> the existing data in the UX. It might at a future time also consist of removing
>> the data from the DB all together.
>> 
>> What do people think?
> 
> IIUC, you're proposing to error on uploads of distributions with these
> fields set. This wouldn't effect distributions already uploaded and wouldn't
> cause (new) breakage for consumers of those distributions.  The only
> breakage would be for authors uploading the buggy distributions. These
> are the people who could actually address the breakage and who would benefit
> from the breakage by finding out that they have a bug in their distributions.
> This seems an appropriate form of breakage to me, so +1.
> 
> Jim
> 
> -- 
> Jim Fulton
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton

This is correct, the only place it would break is for someone uploading
something that used this, which is a signal to them to go remove those
fields. There is a good chance they are sing those fields thinking they
do something they don't, and even if they understand those fields the
fields themselves are more or less useless so losing them isn't a big
issue IMO.

For some numbers, 6% of the projects hosted on PyPI have *ever*
uploaded a release using the requires field. (This does not mean they
are actively using it, just that at least once they did use it). I think that's
a pretty low number of affected users, especially when they can immediately
fix it and I can provide an error message telling them what to do.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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