[Python-Dev] need info for externally maintained modules PEP

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:47 PM 4/8/2006 -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:
>  Do people think we need to document the version that has
>been imported into Python and when that was done as well?

Definitely.  Better yet, in 2.5 I'd like to have the version information 
embedded in a PKG-INFO file that gets installed with Python, so that 
setuptools can detect the package's presence.  (This is particularly 
important for cytpes, sqlite, and ElementTree, which were added in 2.5 and 
thus may be listed in package dependencies for 2.3/2.4 programs.)

Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to ensure that the PKG-INFO 
files get built, because there's only one setup.py in the Python build 
process at the moment.

It would be good if we could have separate setup.py files for "external" 
libraries, not only because of the ability to get PKG-INFO installed, but 
also because then OS vendors that split those externals out into separate 
system packages wouldn't need to jump through as many hoops to build just a 
single external library like ElementTree or ctypes.