I've just released version 0.1.3 of distlib on PyPI [1]. For newcomers, distlib is a library of packaging functionality which is intended to be usable as the basis for third-party packaging tools. The changes in this release are as follows: database.py: Added support for PEP 426 JSON metadata (pydist.json). Generalised digests to support e.g. SHA256. Fixed a bug in parsing legacy metadata from .egg directories. Removed duplicated code relating to parsing "provides" fields. index.py: Changes relating to support for PEP 426 JSON metadata (pydist.json). locators.py: Changes relating to support for PEP 426 JSON metadata (pydist.json). Fixed a bug in scoring download URLs for preference when multiple URLs are available. The legacy scheme is used for the default locator. Made changes relating to parsing "provides" fields. Generalised digests to support e.g. SHA256. If no release version is found for a requirement, prereleases are now considered even if not explicitly requested. markers.py: Added support for markers as specified in PEP 426. metadata.py: Added support for PEP 426 JSON metadata (pydist.json). The old metadata class is renamed to LegacyMetadata, and the (new) Metadata class wraps the JSON format (and also the legacy format, through LegacyMetadata). Removed code which was only used if docutils was installed. This code implemented validation of .rst descriptions, which is not done in distlib. scripts.py: Updated the logic for writing executable files to deal as best we can with files which are already in use and hence cannot be deleted on Windows. Changed the script generation when launchers are used to write a single executable which wraps a script (whether pre-built or generated) and includes a manifest to avoid UAC prompts on Windows. Changed the interface for script generation options: the "make" and "make_multiple" methods of ScriptMaker now take an optional options dictionary. util.py: Added extract_by_key() to copy selected keys from one dict to another. Added parse_name_and_version() for use in parsing "provides" fields. Made split_filename more flexible. version.py: Added support for PEP 440 version matching. Removed AdaptiveVersion, AdaptiveMatcher etc. as they don't add sufficient value to justify keeping them in. wheel.py: Added wheel_version kwarg to Wheel.build API. Changed Wheel.install API (after consultation on distutils-sig). Added support for PEP 426 JSON metadata (pydist.json). Added lib_only flag to install() method. docs: Numerous documentation updates, not detailed further here. tests: Numerous test refinements, not detailed further here. other: Corrected setup.py to ensure that executable wrappers are included. Please try it out, and give some feedback using the issue tracker! [2] Regards, Vinay Sajip [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/distlib/0.1.3 [2] https://bitbucket.org/pypa/distlib/issues/new