Re: Partial automation of egg dependencies

[Lassi Kortela]

> My take on that as a user: I care about dependencies and tend to avoid
> eggs with many dependencies.  If I see `(auto-dependencies)' in an egg
> file, I don't know the dependencies of that egg.  I would not like that.
>
> Also, that would break the [reverse] dependency ranks of salmonella
> reports.

auto-dependencies should only cover things that are possible to compute 
statically by looking at the source files. So you'd have a simple, 
predictable tool that expands them to manual dependencies at will.

The main source of trouble is that this:

(import foo bar baz)

specifies stuff that is then duplicated in the .egg file. When the 
imports change, the .egg has to be changed too. Else the build may break.

This is the same problem that C/C++ programmers face in keeping 
makefiles synced with #include. Many of them concluded that thy can't 
maintain correct makefiles by hand, and wrote tools like makedepend.