dependency links...

[chrism]

Hi Alberto and friends,

I'm wondering if it would be possible, going forward, to remove
"dependency_links" from the setup.py of Tosca/Rum packages. If people
are installing TW packages from pypi, and all the dependent packages
are on PyPI, these are not necessary. But more importantly,
dependency links tend to break repeatability of installation via
easy_install for folks who try to use indexes as a repeatability
measure (creating an index to always get the same version of packages
based on the index in use). See http://plope.com/Members/chrism/distribution_links_considered_harmful/view
for more of this argument.

While this is actually a setuptools misfeature, it would be useful for
both TG and for Repoze if the TW packages had no dependency_links, as
both projects try to use individual indexes to represent releases, and
distribution_links present in setup.py foils this effort. Currently,
I'm needing to create separate distributions of each TW package we use
just to remove dependency_links.

[Alberto Valverde]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you... I've read that link and
agree mostly with your arguments to the point that I also think TW and
Rum packages should remove the dependency_links option from setup.py.
These were added before I knew about the custom indexes technique to
make releases in an attempt to let easy_install know about some packages
which were not registered at pypi and I wasn't aware of how it breaks
repeatability when a custom index is used.

I've just removed dependency_links from ToscaWidgets tw.forms and
tw.tinyme, please let me know if I've missed some package.

Cheers,
Alberto