[Distutils] Metadata 2.0: Warning if optional features are missing

[Paul Moore]

On 15 December 2015 at 16:37, Michael Merickel <mmericke at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems to me this would be easily accomplished by declaring some extras
> like "cext" as default-included and if the install fails someone can depend on
> "sqlalchemy[-cext]". The UI isn't quite as nice as your proposal but reuses
> existing machinery.

Hmm, so sqlalchemy says it provides an extra "speedups" (or "cext") by
default, checks for a compiler, and removes that extra from what's
installed if there's no compiler available?

Not sure why anyone would depend on sqlalchemy[-cext] - they should
always depend on sqlalchemy, as there's no functional difference
between with speedups and without. And the user should never specify
the extra, all they do is install a compiler and rebuild.

>> What I'd like to be able to do:
>>
>> 1. pip install sqlalchemy works, but shows a warning "optional feature
>> speedups not installed - no C compiler"
>
> Extras wouldn't give a nice message like this. The install would fail and
> the user would have to guess as to why and then opt out of the default
> extra. Perhaps some better error message could be displayed if the package
> failed to install and had a default extra included to show how to opt out.

But the install doesn't fail - it succeeds and works fine, just
without some speedups. That's exactly what I want. In my particular
case I was installing csvkit which depends on sqlalchemy. It doesn't
(nor should it) say that it doesn't need the speedups, nor should I
have to manually locate the specific dependency (from a list of many)
and install it by hand before my install works. The current behaviour
(pip install csvkit -> a working csvkit with no issues) is perfect.

But if I later want to use SQLalchemy independently, or I find that a
particular usage of csvkit is too slow, I want to know that there's a
speedups module I can get by downloading a binary build or installing
my own compiler. And I want to be able to install it transparently.

>> 3. A command to reinstall the currently installed version with new options
>>    pip install --add-options sqlalchemy[speedups]
>>    (Note that a plain pip install doesn't do this, as it won't
>> reinstall. And --upgrade or --ignore-installed will install newer
>> versions).
>
> This should be done by simply reinstalling the package via "pip install
> sqlalchemy[speedups]". I doubt you need an extra --add-options flag to
> compete with extras.

I guess you're saying add [speedups] as a way of requesting a rebuild?
But if the build fails, would that remove sqlalchemy, or leave the
existing build there? (I'd hope the latter).

Won't that say "sqlalchemy is already installed"? (I've never used
extras with pip, so I don't know). Also what if there's been a newer
version of sqlalchemy released? Won't it get that one?

I specifically want to say here "just reinstall the exact version I
have here, but try again to include optional stuff that I didn't get
last time". (In practice I don't really care much if I upgrade, so
--upgrade or --ignore-installed is probably fine in reality).

Anyway, all of this requires people to implement it, in pip and build
tools, as well as projects to adopt it. So it's not really important
that the details get thrashed out right now, just that we establish
whether it's a practical scenario to support, and get a feel for how
much work it would be for projects to adopt it (if it's too much, they
won't, and the feature will end up unused). So the fact that extras
might be able to support this is the main point here, not the details
of how it would work - so thanks.

Paul