Re: [Distutils] packaging terminology confusion

Brad Allen wrote:

This quote is taken from the distutils thread "current preferred way to specify dependencies? future?",

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

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On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 3:35 PM, John Gabriele wrote:

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I'm a bit confused myself... PEP-345 says it "describes a mechanism for adding metadata to Python packages", but I think they really mean "distributions" (the things available at the PyPI). Yes you are right, that was a mistake. I've just fixed it.

Sorry, but I'm baffled. Are we really now using the word 'distribution' for those 'things available at the PyPI'?

The text inside PEP-345 uses the word 'distutils project' a lot as the name for this concept.

It's very common to see the word 'package' used to refer to these 'distutils projects'; but in the Python documentation we also use the word 'package' to refer to any directory having an __init__.py. Can the word 'package' be used for both concepts? Maybe a qualifier would help, like module-package and setup-package.

Normally the word 'distribution' is reserved for what lands in the 'dist' directory, such as a tarball or an egg...right?

We should use the terminology as defined in http://docs.python.org/distutils/introduction.html#distutils-specific-termin... So technically it's a "module distribution" we're talking about.