On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 8:18 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
We need approximately five fields:
Name Version Provides-Extra Requires-Dist Setup-Requires-Dist
the rest are useless, never need to be parsed by anyone, or are already sent to pypi as a dict.
We need the environment markers language.
We need the requirements specifiers >= 4.0.0, < 9.
You're taking a disappointingly narrow view of the metadata, it seems to me. If you look at the totality of metadata which describes distributions in the here- and-now world of setuptools, it's a lot more than that - just look at any of my metadata files which I've pointed to in the "distil" documentation.
You're only talking about *installation* metadata, but even there your coverage is incomplete. I won't go into any more details now, but suffice to say that as I am working on "distil", I am coming across decisions about installation which either I hard-code into distil (thus making it quite likely that another tool will give different results), or enshrine in installation metadata (constraining all compliant tools to adhere to the developer's and/or user's wishes in that area).
Hooray for JSON. I actually liked the separation and viewed it as a de-coupling feature, but that will probably be less important as we avoid setup.py generating different metadata for each execution.