[Distutils] Name the software! Package quality tester.

[P.J. Eby]

At 11:46 AM 3/7/2011 +0100, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>I'll make a note of this in the documentation to clear it up.
>Distutils2 is definitely in the minority at the moment when it comes
>to calling them "projects".

The term has been in use in setuptools since around 2005, but it 
hasn't caught on much outside of the small group of people who need 
to be able to speak precisely about the concept.  ;-)

If you search the sig archives, though, you will find that it gets 
proposed and mostly-approved every time the topic comes up, of what 
to call these "things we distribute releases of".  The more-or-less 
consensus terminology (for people who need a precise terminology):

package = thing you import in Python that contains modules
project = thing you make releases of
release = one version of a project
distribution = a file that embodies the release of a project (may be 
source or binary)

People who don't care about precision just call everything a package, 
pretty much.  Heck, a lot of times I find myself starting to type 
"package" when I'm really talking about a project, release, or 
distribution, despite promoted the more-precise terminology for half 
a decade or so.  ;-)