On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > > On Oct 17, 2013, at 11:23 AM, Jim Fulton <j...@zope.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzy...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On 17 October 2013 11:56, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: >>>> >>>> Arguably it's already broken. I've had to explain to a number of people >>>> that it won't cause their dependencies to install. I think its way more >>>> user >>>> friendly to tell them up front then to confuse them when it doesn't work or >>>> when it appears to work but they get an error from a - >>>> >>> >>> You're proposing replacing "arguably broken" (by some definition) >> >> Is there any reason to think that it ever actually worked in any way? > > Depends what you mean by "worked", it does nothing except tell users > what they need available to ``import``. It doesn't tell them how to get that > or what provides it. As far as this piece of metadata is concerned requires > "xml" can be satisfied by ``touch xml.py``. > > So it "works" in that it does what it was originally intended to do, it's > just that > what it was originally intended to do is backwards and useless.
I'm 92% sure it was intended to support automated dependency management, but then setuptools went in a different (better) direction. Jim -- Jim Fulton http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
