Do any tools support Provides-Dist metadata for python packages? If not, why?

Question

The python package metadata specification includes the field Provides-Dist, which seems to allow for a package to declare that it provides the functionality of a different package (or virtual package).

This feature seems like it would be useful for something like TensorFlow where the same interface is provided by many different related packages: tensorflow, tensorflow-gpu, tf-nightly, ..., making it effectively impossible for other python packages to "install_requires" tensorflow (most major packages omit it).

According to that specification document, this feature is "rarely used".

• Are there python packaging tools that use Provides-Dist? Either generating it or using it?

• Is there any other documented reason (including public discussions) why this feature is not supported? The metadata specification vaguely declares "it isn’t at all clear how tools should interpret them in the context of an open index server", but it's not clear to me why that is a problem since presumably any abusive package would have to be explicitly installed by the user first, and there are plenty of other ways in which installed packages can be evil.

Answer 1

As far as I know no tool supports Provides-Dist.

The following comment seems to corroborate:

• https://discuss.python.org/t/conditional-package-install-depending-on-other-packages-in-environment/4140/2