[tahoe-dev] making Tahoe nicer to hack on

[Brian Warner]

On 10/18/10 12:00 AM, Ravi Pinjala wrote:
> 
> I'd even suggest that what you're suggesting for downloading the
> dependencies is too much. The standard for *nix systems (in other
> words, what users expect) is for the package to fail-fast at build
> time if anything's missing, and let the package manager sort out the
> deps ahead of time.

Yeah, I kind of want "setup.py install" to behave like that (check for
dependencies, by importing them, but not try to download or build any of
them), and provide pointers to a different tool (currently named
"setup.py build_deps") that will do the fancy handy automatic
download/build part. I'm on the fence as to whether fancy-handy should
be the default or not, but I think I prefer not, as long as there's an
obvious command for folks who want that sort of thing to get it.

cheers,
 -Brian