When packaging a Python module, is there a way to let the user know what OS packages will be required?

  softwareengineering

I’m trying to package a Python library that works with an LDAP server.

When installing on Ubuntu, my library requires libldap2 and libsasl2. When installing it on CentOS, there are different libraries. When on Windows, there are yet other libraries.

When running the Pip installer, I always have to search through the stack dump to find a line that looks something like…

         25 | #include <sasl/sasl.h>

… and then do some google searching on the web to figure out what the appropriate set of libraries is for the platform I’m running on. This is often an error-prone multi-step process. Is there a way of checking for these dependencies before I run and suggesting actions that the user should take?

  • python
  • packages
  • dependency-management

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