[Python-Dev] Status of undocumented distutils features in 2.4? (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Thu Oct 7 03:40:34 CEST 2004

On Wednesday 06 October 2004 07:51 pm, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

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.

Anthony and I threw those together pretty quickly at PyCon; it's not clear that they're useful. For Zope Corp., they won't be. We've decided that we will not be adding version assignments into the codebase, because there lies a stupid maintenance hassle.

I have no intention of documenting that stuff myself.

Should these be removed for 2.4?

Yes.

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

Frankly, I have no confidence that we'll ever end up with an agreement on something that's sufficient and still easy to use. Versioning simply isn't any easy aspect of packaging.

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".

You're being generous. ;-)

It's unfortunate that PEP 262 was deferred, but that's what happens when no one has time to work on the beast.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr.

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