[Python-Dev] need info for externally maintained modules PEP (original) (raw)

Andrew Bennetts andrew-pythondev at puzzling.org
Mon Apr 10 01:35:57 CEST 2006

On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 02:48:47PM -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

At 07:56 PM 4/9/2006 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote: [...] >-1. These aren't external libraries; they are part of Python.

They were external libraries. Also, many OS vendors nonetheless split the standard library into different system packages, e.g. Debian's longstanding tradition of excising the distutils into a separate python-dev package.

Debian has fixed this bug. The entire standard library, including distutils, is now in the python2.4 package. The python2.4-dev package mainly contains header files now. This has been true for some time; it's certainly the case in the current stable release.

As much as we might wish that vendors not do these things, they often have practical matters of continuity and documentation to deal with; if they currently have a "python-ctypes" package, for example, they may wish to maintain that even when ctypes is bundled with 2.5.

They can do that just by shipping an empty "python-ctypes" package that depends on the full python package.

-Andrew.

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