[Distutils] Deprecate and Block requires/provides

[Jim Fulton]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> On Oct 17, 2013, at 11:23 AM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 17 October 2013 11:56, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Arguably it's already broken. I've had to explain to a number of people
>>>> that it won't cause their dependencies to install. I think its way more user
>>>> friendly to tell them up front then to confuse them when it doesn't work or
>>>> when it appears to work but they get an error from a -
>>>>
>>>
>>> You're proposing replacing "arguably broken" (by some definition)
>>
>> Is there any reason to think that it ever actually worked in any way?
>
> Depends what you mean by "worked", it does nothing except tell users
> what they need available to ``import``. It doesn't tell them how to get that
> or what provides it. As far as this piece of metadata is concerned requires
> "xml" can be satisfied by ``touch xml.py``.
>
> So it "works" in that it does what it was originally intended to do, it's just that
> what it was originally intended to do is backwards and useless.

I'm 92% sure it was intended to support automated dependency management,
but then setuptools went in a different (better) direction.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton