[Zope3-dev] More thoughts on packaging

[Fred Drake]

On Friday 13 February 2004 05:20 pm, Jim Fulton wrote:
 > Assuming that the "this" you are talking about is dependency management,
 > I believe that this was planned for distutils.  Do you know of any other
 > attempts to add dependency management to (or over) distutils?

Actually, by "this" I meant something a little different: moving package 
metadata into packages.

Right now, we have the problem that every distribution we ship that includes 
(for example) ZConfig has to deal with all the bits and pieces that go 
along with the code, including not only the documentation but also the 
ancillary files placed inside the packages (schema components, 
configuration files for the tests, etc.).  All this information is repeated 
for Zope 2, Zope 3, ZODB, and StandaloneZConfig.  And maybe other places I 
don't know about.  There is a similar situation for BTrees, zLOG, ZODB, 
ZEO, and who know what else.

We definately want the top-level setup.py scripts to say "that package", but 
we want that package to define for itself what constitutes that package.

Dependency information is just one portion of a package's metadata.  It 
should be included along with the other metadata related to the package 
itself.  I'd be happy for it to live in the same place as the other package 
metadata if we can get that to be in the right place: the package itself.

Using setup.py as a container for the package metadata has not worked well 
as all, given how many setup.py scripts we maintain.


-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fred at zope.com>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation