On 31.03.2010 18:18, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
Dear Debianizers,
NB. I have asked similar question at debian-python [1] but had no
replies, so re-posting to -devel now
I am ITPing python-scikits-learn and possibly few other python-scikits-*
packages in the future. All of the packages would have 1 peculiarity,
they all would rely on having
$> cat /usr/share/pyshared/scikits/__init__.py
__import__('pkg_resources').declare_namespace(__name__)
As a resolution I am planing to package some silly Debian-native
(there is no per se the upstream for this single file) package
python-scikits-common
which would provide that base directory with __init__.py
This is a simple, robust way of packaging this file. You don't need to package this as a separate source, usually it can be built as a separate binary from some source which is common to all of these packages (as e.g. done in zope.interface). Or include it in a package which is needed as a dependency of all these python-scikits-* packages.
Am I missing possible other alternative (I think that unpleasant and evil diverts, or inappropriate for this case alternatives aren't real choices here, right)?
diversions only work if there is exactly one package diverting a file. Alternatives are a possibility, but afaik not yet used for this purpose. It would be nice if dpkg comes up with a declarative way of describing alternatives. Other ways of providing/creating this file at installation time should not be used.
Upstream is aware of the problem, http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0382/, but still lacks an implementation.
Matthias