Bug#840482: [diffoscope] error at startup

[Brett Smith]

On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 23:14:25 +0000 Mattia Rizzolo <mattia at debian.org> wrote:
> The python package of python-libarchive-c is espressing a fixed
> dependency on libarchive13 for this; do python package have any way of
> expressing such dependency? Or the only improvements that could be done
> here is python-libarchive-c¹ to ward that part offerring a nicer error
> message?

Python packages can only express dependencies on other Python packages. 
Right now libarchive's setup.py has a bit of code to try to check that
the C library is available at all; maybe that could be extended to check
the version too.  But the dependency can't be expressed in any
machine-readable way unfortunately.

-- 
Brett Smith