[Distutils] [Python Language Summit] Distutils / Packaging survey

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:34 AM, Floris Bruynooghe
<floris.bruynooghe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> setup.cfg could be used in that case.
>
> setup.cfg is a configuration file to be edited by developers.  Going
> to modify that at build time is guaranteed to result in unhappy people
> at some stage I reckon.
>

right

>> But having a .py file would allow having some values calculated
>> dynamically,
>
> But those could be calculated at the time setup.py runs too.
>
> If it's not directly a .py file there needs to be an stdlib module to
> access it easily, manually using ConfigParser is not an option IMHO,
> I'd rather do `import foo; foo.prefix'.
>
> An argument against a generated .py file is that this won't work for
> single-module python distributions.  But having a .cfg file or
> something next to the module/package might defeat the point of trying
> to help the FHS in violating it already.  OTOH .egg-info does that too
> and seems to be accepted currently.

Well, the egg-info file is the static version of setup.py metadata in some way,
I would find a new file redundant.

I am really curious though, to see what the file would contain..

from my current understanding, and having in mind to introduce such a
file in a way things
can gently evolve:

What if an egg-info-like file was present in the package from the very
beginning,
describing the package metadata, and used by setup.py, *and* at build time
by third party tools. (with setup.py knowing that it can be changed at run time)

egg.info file:
=========
Metadata-Version: 1.0
Name: foo
Version: 1.0
etc..
*new metadata modified at build time*
=========

setup.py file:
==========
from disutils.core import setup, get_metadata

static_metadata = get_metadata()

static_metadata['more_things'] = 'xxx'

setup(**static_metadata)
==========

Regards
Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/