Re: Finer Extension dependencies

On ons, 2012-03-28 at 23:00 -0700, Hitoshi Harada wrote:
> I totally agree with Robert's point that one feature is not
> standardized and nobody can tell how you can depend on the feature in
> the end.  Mind you, I've never heard about building dependency by its
> name as a string in other packaging system.  If you want to introduce
> the concept of version dependency not feature name dependency, do
> *it*;  I don't think feature dependency solves it.

The Python setuptools (a.k.a. distutils a.k.a. distribute a.k.a. eggs
a.k.a. easy_install a.k.a. dont-get-me-started) system supports feature
names that a package can provide, but it uses them for a different
purpose.  The idea is that a package "foo" can depend on a package
"bar[somethingextra]", and then bar itself would declare it's
dependencies such that it depends, say, on "ham", but if feature
"somethingextra" is required, it also depends on "eggs".

This is actually quite useful, but it breaks down when you, say, want to
wrap your egg into a Debian package.