[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] Python module's name changed unnecessarily, making it impossible to express dependencies on it (#373)

Adam Williamson notifications at github.com
Fri Dec 22 19:07:12 UTC 2017


"Since we don't publish to PyPI for very obvious reasons, any reliance on setuptools information was always hokey."

The document I linked above *specifically states that it is reasonable to express dependencies on things that aren't in pypi*. In a section titled...[Dependencies that aren't in PyPI](https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#id13).

"Most developers expect the name to be Y" is a good reason to call the thing 'Y' in the first place. But it's not a good reason to rename it from 'X' to 'Y' if it's already been called 'X' for years. Whether you guys actually understood these mechanisms or not (it's sounding a lot like "not"), *you called it that*, and that name was available for people to express a dependency on. Arbitrarily taking it away again (and needlessly breaking my stuff when I upgrade a system from F26 to F27) is not good.

I know of several codebases in this nexus, actually, because there are a few things people commonly want to do that there is no good Python library to use for. The infamous example is parsing NEVRAs; there was a function for doing this in hawkey, but then someone decided to kill hawkey. So now `rpm` is one of the few not-very-good candidates for doing it.

Note that someone went and built an *entire project* to work around the awkwardness of trying to use this library in real life:

https://github.com/junaruga/rpm-py-installer

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