[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#912661: python-tifffile: tifffile is not installed as distribution

[carandraug]

Package: python-tifffile
Version: 20170929-1
Severity: important

Python's tifffile is available in two forms:

1) download as individual files at https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/
2) python package at PyPI https://pypi.org/project/tifffile/

Debian makes use of the individual files via a mirror at
https://github.com/malaterre/tifffile which seems to exist for Debian
only.

Because it's not installed as a package, setuptools will not "see" it
and report it as not being installed.  The effect of this is that
installing a package dependent on tifffile, will require installation
of the package, even if the module is already available.

Effectively, the following needs to succeed:

    $ python -c 'import pkg_resources; pkg_resources.get_distribution("tifffile")'
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 476, in get_distribution
        dist = get_provider(dist)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 352, in get_provider
        return working_set.find(moduleOrReq) or require(str(moduleOrReq))[0]
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 895, in require
        needed = self.resolve(parse_requirements(requirements))
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 781, in resolve
        raise DistributionNotFound(req, requirers)
    pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'tifffile' distribution was not found and is required by the application

The change would make

  1) the Debian package play nicer with other python packages
  2) the github repo no longer necessary
  3) easier to track dependencies (looking through the changelog file in
     Debian sources, seems that it was a problem a few times)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages python-tifffile depends on:
ii  libc6                             2.27-8
ii  python [python-importlib]         2.7.15-3
ii  python-concurrent.futures         3.2.0-2
ii  python-enum34                     1.1.6-2
ii  python-numpy [python-numpy-abi9]  1:1.14.5-1+b1
ii  python2 [python-importlib]        2.7.15-3

Versions of packages python-tifffile recommends:
ii  python-matplotlib  2.2.2-4+b1

python-tifffile suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information