On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Chris Withers
Hi All,
Looks like we have quite a consistent set of rules with regard to captilisation of package names on file systems where case isn't important, shame the same can't be said for distribution names.
So, looks like case is important in package names.
With distribution names, it becomes much more murky. Setuptools, and so all the ilk that use it, is happy to ignore case naming for distributions. To make matters worse, it also uses os.path.normcase on any distributions obtained from a Windows file system, which will *always* corrupt any distribution names that aren't all lower case already.
These differences cause subtle problems in tools which attempt to pin versions of particular distributions.
I've pretty much decided to view these problems in buildout as bugs.
So, I guess I'm asking why we don't just say "distribution names are case sensitive" and be done with it? If the case of a requirement or distribution name is wrong, it would be good to get early failures rather than subtle and annoying bugs later on down the line.
Of course, the horse is already bolted on this.
Yup. Sadly.
The only "sane" option now would be for all distribution names to be lowercased by all tools all of the time. How do others feel about this?
Regardless of how this is accomplished internally, I agree that software (like buildout) that deals with project specifications needs to assume that project names are case insensitive. Jim -- Jim Fulton