[Distutils] packaging terminology confusion

[Brad Allen]

This quote is taken from the distutils thread "current preferred way
to specify dependencies? future?",

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 3:35 PM, John Gabriele <jmg3000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm a bit confused myself... PEP-345 says it "describes a mechanism
>> for adding metadata to Python packages", but I think they really mean
>> "distributions" (the things available at the PyPI).
>
> Yes you are right, that was a mistake.  I've just fixed it.

Sorry, but I'm baffled. Are we really now using the word
'distribution' for those 'things available at the PyPI'?

The text inside PEP-345 uses the word 'distutils project' a lot as the
name for this concept.

It's very common to see the word 'package' used to refer to these
'distutils projects'; but in the Python documentation we also use the
word 'package' to refer to any directory having an __init__.py.  Can
the word 'package' be used for both concepts? Maybe a qualifier would
help, like module-package and setup-package.

Normally the word 'distribution' is reserved for what lands in the
'dist' directory, such as a tarball or an egg...right?