I'd like to take the opportunity to discuss some of the work done at ActiveState that is pertinent to the discussion at hand. While I suspect most people subscribed to this list are already familiar, I'll assume nothing for clarity sake. In its current form a repository is accessible which allows for easy installation of python packages (see http://www.ActiveState.com/PPMPackages/PyPPM/2.1/ ) Our equivalent of PKG-INFO is a PPD file type that stores data in an XML format. A PPD file describes a PyPPM package which is a built distutils package in an archive format (.tar.gz or .zip depending on platform). While currently packages can only be downloaded, a demo will be presented at the upcoming O'Reilly open source conference of a repository which exposes functionality discussed in the catalog SIG. In addition to the standard metadata handled by distutils (author,author_email,license, etc.) a PPD can contain the following elements: INSTALL - an installation string for installing packages distributed in a non-distutils binary distribution format (eg. RPM, setup.exe etc.) DEPENDENCIES - handles dependencies (eg. PIL-Graph's dependence on PIL) IMPLEMENTATION - an implementation may contain a PYTHONCORE, ARCHITECTURE, and OS elements, in addition to a CODEBASE element. The CODEBASE element defines the URL of the actual package, while the others define the relevant implementation characteristics of said package When a PyPPM package is installed on a client machine package instance data is stored in an XML database. In its current form, the database stores configuration information for the PyPPM client (eg. a repository location is specified), and descriptions of packages installed (essentially all the information contained in a PPD minus implementation data for other platforms). Additionally storing each file installed within a package would allow for provision of the functionality suggested (and sorely needed :)) in Andrew's PEP. I would argue that adopting an XML format would be beneficial, unless performance is deemed a major issue, however I suspect people don't want to rehash PPD vs. PKG-INFO type arguments