[Distutils] C extension dependencies

Bohuslav Kabrda bkabrda at redhat.com
Thu Sep 11 15:59:40 CEST 2014


----- Original Message -----

> > On Sep 11, 2014, at 4:37 AM, Paul Moore < p.f.moore at gmail.com > wrote:
> 

> > On 11 September 2014 08:15, Donald Stufft < donald at stufft.io > wrote:
> 

> > > Perhaps the gains wouldn’t be worth the complexity though and it’d
> > 
> 
> > > just be easier to allow projects to have a build hint thing that gets
> > 
> 
> > > printed if the build fails.
> > 
> 

> > Putting it in core pip sounds to me like a recipe for endless
> 
> > system-specific hacks, TBH. Having a plugin system that allowed
> 
> > external packages to add (and maintain!) system-specific checks might
> 
> > work, but that's pretty complex.
> 

> > Paul
> 

> Yes to be specific the only thing I would personally be OK with adding to the
> pip core is something that added the appropiate hooks to let some other thing
> provide the platform specific mechanisms. I'm still not sure it's worth the
> effort over the simpler idea of just providing a build_hint metadata that
> authors can use to say "Hey you need to isntall libxml2 for this thing" or
> whatever.

While working on packaging Ruby and Rubygems for Fedora, we actually used a Rubygems hook to create a plugin that did precisely this, it's called gem-nice-install [1] (we did use it for some time, but I'm not sure whether it's still being actively developed and used) 
We actually went a step further and implemented the *actual installation* in that plugin (sending list of packages to install to PackageKit via dbus) and it worked really nice. 
I think allowing plugins is much better than providing build hint, because build hint may not give you information about *what* (different distros name some packages differently), but most importantly *how* the missing packages should be installed. And IMO upstreams shouldn't care about this (they shouldn't *need* to care), this is the work of distro packagers. So I vote for plugins. 

Thanks, 
Slavek 

> ---
> Donald Stufft

[1] https://github.com/voxik/gem-nice-install 
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