I follow your reasoning and I think your conclusion is reasonable. On
the other hand, I don’t think it would be an undue burden for packagers
to have to add a manual “BuildRequires:” on a -devel package when
building compiled Python extensions linked against another Python
package’s C API, just as would be needed for a pure C or C++ library. I
am thus on the fence about whether the conditional Requires is the best
way to go.
In any case, the most notable package that offers a C API used by other
Python extensions is certainly numpy. Currently, it does not provide a
python3-numpy-devel subpackage at all. No matter what we decide the best
practice should be, we should probably make sure numpy follows it.
It may be that the conditional Requires is a good approach for adding
python3-*-devel subpackages to packages that lack them without having to
make mass changes to dependent packages’ spec files, even if we don’t
end up recommending that approach for the general case.
On 2/17/23 09:38, Miro Hrončok wrote:
Hello Pythonistats and packaging folks.
Tomáš (CCed) approached me today with an interesting question.
A Python package he is packaging into RPM (python3-rapidfuzz) installs
some development files (.h and .pxd).
Tomáš queried upstream about those files to figure out if they should
be installed or if they are only needed to build the package itself.
Upstream responded:
> rapidfuzz.h and __init__.pxd provide a capi for rapidfuzz, which
allows users
> to write their own similarity metrics in C/C++/Cython, which can be
called by
> rapidfuzz in a more performant way through this C-API.
> For this reason the header file should be part of the installation
as well.
OK, we want to ship them. Our packaging guidelines however say:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#_devel_packages
> Specifically, -devel packages must be used to contain files which are
> intended solely for development or needed only at build-time. This
is done to
> minimize the install footprint for users. There are some types of
files which
> almost always belong in a -devel package:
> - Header files...
So from our guidelines perspective, the files would go to
python3-rapidfuzz-devel. The way we packaged Python in 201x, this
would be the end of it.
However, in this decade with automatic Python BuildRequires, we could
easily end up in this situation:
1. a Python package lists rapidfuzz as a build requirement
2. %pyproject_buildrequires generates a dependency on
python3dist(rapidfuzz)
3. only python3-rapidfuzz is pulled
4. %build wants to use rapidfuzz.h
5. packager needs to manually BuildRequire python3-rapidfuzz-devel
To avoid (5), my suggestion was to add the following requirement to
python3-rapidfuzz:
Requires: (python3-rapidfuzz-devel%{?_isa} =
%{?epoch:%{epoch}:}%{version}-%{release} if python3-devel)
That way, application packages that pull in pytohn3-rapidfuzz as a
runtime dependency won't get it (we are minimizing the install
footprint for users), but users who build stuff (including RPM
packages) will get it (we make automatically generated dependencies
work as intended).
(Of course, users who have python3-devel installed for reasons other
than rapidfuxx will still get the files, but the assumption here is
that users who install -devel packages intent to /generally/ build
stuff.)
Is that a good suggestion? And if so, should it be a general
recommendation for such cases?
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