Use of Python script in PHP library may cause packaging disruptions

[tmanok]

Hi AWS CRT team,

First, thank you for providing and maintaining aws-crt-php. Your work makes it possible for many projects (including BookStack and others I’ve encountered in Debian packaging) to integrate AWS functionality smoothly, and that’s deeply appreciated.

I wanted to bring up a small point about the inclusion of format-check.py in the repository. While I understand it’s intended as a developer utility for maintaining code style, its presence can cause some unexpected friction when this library is packaged for Linux distributions.

Specifically:
The script has a #!/usr/bin/env python3 shebang. Tools like lintian (used in Debian packaging) detect this and automatically infer that the binary package must depend on Python 3. This can lead to end users pulling in Python unnecessarily, even though the script is not required at runtime and the project itself is a PHP library.

Distribution packaging policies generally require all installed files to be runnable in the environment, so keeping development-only scripts out of installed artifacts is important. This isn’t a critical issue (packagers can exclude the file when building packages), but it does create a bit of extra work and the possibility of confusion for downstream users.

Possible solutions might include:

• Moving format-check.py into a tools/ or dev/ directory that’s not installed as part of the distributed package.
• Or documenting it as a developer-only helper, ensuring it isn’t bundled into vendor distributions.

Would the team be open to considering this adjustment? It would help distributions ship the package cleanly without introducing spurious dependencies. Thanks again for your work on AWS CRT!

Cheers,

Triston Line