On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Donald Stufft
I have some unpublished work I should publish.
Part of the point with what i'm trying to do is to define a standard for what is inside a package, but not really for how you take a particular set of files and turn it into that. So if you want to edit yaml you can have a yaml file and have a package creation tool that turns that yaml into the standard json that gets added to the package. The same can be said for a python file or a setup.cfg or whatever. Ideally the roles of package creation, building, and installation should be able to be completely separate. So my goal is to facilitate that by creating a standard way to describe all the data about a distribution, including extensible data in a way that any tool can serialize or deserialize it losslessly.
Note that all this work has already been done in Bento. I understand the appeal of using an existing format like yaml, but it is not clear to me how one can handle conditional with it, and I think you want to handle conditionals in there (for platform-dependent dependencies). Bento also has a command to convert setup.py-based projects to bento internal format, adapting it to use another format should not be too difficult. David