On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Ronny Pfannschmidt <Ronny.Pfannschmidt@gmx.de> wrote: [..]
How about turning that file into a real mime message instead of just a set of pseudo mime headers with some pseudo encodings for multiline stuff.
That way the long description could be the body of that message, no more messy recoding needed.
As far as i can tell, all the other optional fields are designed to fit single lines anyway.
The problem is, we may have in the future more multi-line fields so I think we should not use a message-like body. It's not a big problem if PKG-INFO looks messy, as long as we provide APIs to write *and* read it. Notice that there is not official consumers for this file yet as far as I know, PyPI reads the metadata from a form that is pushed by the register command and stores it in its own format. OTHO we could drop RFC 822 completely and go for a simpler format like json for 1.2.. I am not sure how many third party applications this will impact but I don't think there are so many. In any case, they will have to adapt themselves for 1.2, so maybe keeping a RFC 822-like format is less annoying for them. Regards Tarek