[Python-modules-team] Bug#782275: please consider building a python-cffi-runtime package

[Matthias Klose]

Package: src:python-cffi
Version: 0.9.2-1

Reading https://caremad.io/2014/11/distributing-a-cffi-project/
it is pointed out that the module can build bindings on the fly during runtime,
not just during build time for a package.  Now maybe not many packagers will
forget to include an extension in a package, but it looks a bit odd, that I need
to install the python-pycparser package (and probably a compiler package) just
to be able to run an extension built using cffi. Please can we split the package
into two components such that a package usually only depends on a
python-cffi-runtime package, and keeping the build-depends on python-cffi?
dh-python can help translating these dependencies as it does for
python-pkg-resources and python-setuptools.

I shortly chatted with glyph about this idea, and at least he didn't say no
during this chat.  For now that could be implemented with a python-cffi-runtime
package holding all the files without the python-pycparser dependency and a
python-cffi package depending on python-cffi-runtime and python-pycparser. Maybe
some files could be moved to python-cffi.