(following up to my own proposal with a case study)
The Twisted Matrix project is a very big, widely used, well-
engineered Python project.
http://twistedmatrix.com
It requires zope.interface to function. The Twisted hackers are
mostly setuptools-haters, and are certainly not going to start using
and depending on it, but they are willing to declare Twisted's
dependency on zope.interface in a machine-readable way in order to
facilitate correct installation of Twisted. The way they have
currently accomplished this is by importing setuptools but attempting
not to use it, and then if setuptools is present in sys.modules add
the flag to setup(): "install_requires=['zope.interface']":
http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/trunk/setup.py
The goal of all this from the perspective of Twisted developers is
simply to add "This package requires zope.interface ." into their
metadata in a way that setuptools, easy_install, pyinstall,
distribute, stdeb, bbfreeze, vanguardistas.pydebdep, virtualenv, and
other tools will understand. They do not want to use or depend on
setuptools, nor do they want setuptools to have any other effects on
their project than to emit that one simple fact of dependency metadata.
What I am proposing is that in the next release of Python, all that
Twisted developers need to do is put "install_requires=
['zope.interface']" into their invocation of distutils.setup(), and
the appropriate metadata will be included in the resulting .egg-info
in a way that all of the aforementioned tools will understand.
This is a modest proposal -- it is backwards compatible, it is likely
to be forwards-compatible with future Python packaging tools, and it
does not, I hope, cause any problems for people who prefer not to use
it.
Regards,
Zooko
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