[Python-Dev] splitting out bdist_*

[Fred Drake]

On Mar 28, 2009, at 9:33 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
> To be concrete, I think distutils should support (among other things):
> - entry points for plugins
> - entry points as used for producing console and windowed "scripts"

This strikes me as a nice-to-have, but:

1. I don't think they're two distinct features.
2. I'm not convinced these should go in distutils.

I'd rather see an API to get resources from a package, and conventions  
can be developed among tool developers on how to store that  
information in a named resource.

> - dependency declarations for other python packages

This is the most important requirement here, I think.

As part of this, I'd want to be able to say things like "PIL, with  
JPEG and PNG support compiled in."

> - dependency declarations for non-python packages

This would be very nice to have, but I suspect this is actually much  
more difficult than Python package dependencies, especially with any  
pretense at cross-platform expressions of dependencies.

> PJE pointed out "A library that targets Python 2.4 and 2.5 and uses  
> wsgiref, sqlite, ctypes, or ElementTree, for example, may have  
> different dependencies depending on the version it is being  
> installed in." Is that something we want to support?

Even simple cases present issues with regard to this.  For example, I  
work on a project that relies on the uuid module, so we declare a  
dependency on Ka-Ping Ye's uuid module (since we're using Python  
2.4).  How should we write that in a version-agnostic way if we want  
to use the standard library version of that module with newer Pythons?


   -Fred

-- 
Fred Drake   <fdrake at acm.org>