Dear Maintainers, PEP 345 [1] describes version 1.2 of the PKG-INFO file that will be shipped with Python distributions in the future. Among other fields it also includes a 'Requires-External' field, which is, as of now, defined like this: --- snip --- Each entry contains a string describing some dependency in the system that the package is to be used. This field is intended to serve as a hint to downstream package maintainers, and has no semantics which are meaningful to the distutils package. The format of a requirement string is a name of an external dependency, optionally followed by a version declaration within parentheses. A version declaration is a series of conditional operators and version numbers, separated by commas. Conditional operators must be one of "<", ">", "<=", ">=", "==", and "!=". If no operator is provided with a version, the "==" operator is used by default. Because they refer to non-Python software releases, version numbers for this field are not required to conform to the format specified in PEP 386 [3]: they should correspond to the version scheme used by the external dependency. Any number of conditional operators can be specified, e.g. the string ">1.0, !=1.3.4, <2.0" is a legal version declaration. Notice that there's is no particular rule on the strings to be used. Examples: Requires-External: C Requires-External: libpng (>=1.5) --- snip --- Would Debian maintainers use this field to extract dependencies of a Python package that have to be handled by the system's package manager? Does the proposed format match your requirements? Are there any changes your would like to see incorporated, so that this field eases your packaging work? There are no plans to normalise entries in this field to a canonical name by PyPii [2], which basically means that the mapping between the identifiers used by upstream and Debian's package names has to be handled by Debian and/or done by the upstream authors. It would be great if you could provide some comments, suggestions or criticism on this topic. kind regards [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0345/ [2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-November/014617.html -- .''`. Wolodja Wentland <wentland@cl.uni-heidelberg.de> : :' : `. `'` 4096R/CAF14EFC `- 081C B7CD FF04 2BA9 94EA 36B2 8B7F 7D30 CAF1 4EFC
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