On 21 August 2013 09:56, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

> ISTM distlib is not yet that reference library - it's just another library
> for most people, judging from the low level of feedback I've had overall.

That's totally fine. We just need to be clear that it's not the reference
library and is instead one implementation.

Yep, there's certainly been a perception that distlib is the reference implementation. Apologies if I perpetuated that.

We do have a slightly different issue then, in that there *isn't* a reference implementation for a lot of this stuff... (I guess wheel counts as the reference implementation for wheel, doh, so that part's covered). People are starting to write code to use these new facilities, so having an actual reference implementation is important (IMO, that's one area where packaging/distutils2 got in a mess, so I'm concerned we don't fall into the same trap). We need people using the new stuff to help us identify potential issues.

Paul

PS Apologies if I appear to be a little irritable on this subject. I have a series of scripts that maintain a local cache of wheels for various projects. I'm starting to hit cases where the wheels aren't usable because of subtle differences in how the spec's being implemented, and it feels like I'm trying to hit a moving target, which is what I thought having the wheel 1.0 PEP accepted was designed to avoid.