[Python-Dev] Status of undocumented distutils features in 2.4?

[Phillip J. Eby]

I was looking up something in the distutils source today, and I noticed 
that there are some new, undocumented, and not quite complete features that 
were added earlier this year.  Specifically, the 'requires' and 'provides' 
arguments to 'setup()', and the 'checkdep' command.

Should these be removed for 2.4?  It doesn't seem likely they'd be able to 
be fleshed out before the beta, especially since as far as I can recall 
they haven't been discussed on the Distutils-SIG yet, and some of the 
features don't seem to be in alignment with the relevant PEPs (e.g. PEP 
262's definition of "requires" and "provides").  And, the actual current 
implementation of the dependency checking is (per the author's comments) 
"kinda hacky".