[Numpy-discussion] [SciPy-dev] Announcing toydist, improving distribution and packaging situation

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Darren Dale <dsdale24 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I should defer to the description of extras in the setuptools
> documentation. It is only a few paragraphs long:
>
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#declaring-extras-optional-features-with-their-own-dependencies

Ok, so there are two issues related to this feature:
  - supporting variant at the build stage
  - supporting different variants of the same package in the
dependency graph at install time

The first issue is definitely supported - I fixed a bug in toydist to
support this correctly, and this will be used when converting
setuptools-based setup.py which use the features argument.

The second issue is more challenging. It complicates the dependency
handling quite a bit, and may cause difficult situations to happen at
dependency resolution time. This becomes particularly messy if you mix
packages you build yourself with packages grabbed from a repository. I
wonder if there is a simpler solution which would give a similar
feature set.

cheers,

David