[Distutils] Deprecate and Block requires/provides

[Donald Stufft]

On Oct 17, 2013, at 11:36 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed - the metadata PEPs really aren't aimed at end users. Until
> something is marked as deprecated in the CPython docs, and actually
> deprecated in the standard library, it isn't really deprecated :)
> 
> We can at least do a documented deprecation in the CPython docs when
> we're implementing the PEP 453 documentation updates (I'll hopefully
> get the Windows path changes in this weekend sometime, and after that
> it should finally be ready for MvL's formal pronouncement)

Ironically the documentation shows how confusing it is because for someone
new coming into packaging that documentation reads like this is what you
put in in order to depend on other things. I would challenge anyone to write
docs that aren't confusing that actually explains what requires actually does.

So again I ask what I need to do to deprecate and remove requires, provides, 
obsoletes. Do I need to make a PEP? Do I need to make a bug tracker issue
and a patch? What's the path forward.

Can we at least agree that these can removed?
  obsoletes_dist - Never been used, never been implemented besides in Distutils2
  requires_external - Used 9 times by 1 project, never been implemented outside of Distutils2
  requires_python - Used 61 times, never been implemented outside of Distutils2

These either have a different method of supporting them in PEP426 (and
thus keeping around two ways of doing the same thing is confusing,
especially when it was never formally implemented) or were omitted
completely.

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20131017/2934e8fb/attachment.sig>