On 21 August 2013 10:48, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
I think Wheel files are (and should be) independent of the particular metadata version used. That file should contain the required information in order to know what version of the metadata is included with the Wheel. This means that as metadata evolves Wheels can just start using the new meta data version without requiring an update to the spec.
That implies that any wheel reference implementation needs to expose APIs for reading and writing the metadata to/from the wheel. I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think the existing implementations do[1]... (And it could be a bit of a beast to design such an interface in a sufficiently future-proof manner, unless we also standardise a metadata object type...) Specifically, if I have a wheel and want to introspect it to find out the author email address, how do I do this? ("Doing so is not supported" is a valid answer, of course, but should also be documented...) Paul [1] Just checked. Distlib doesn't. Wheel doesn't (and wheel doesn't even have a fully documented API). Pip's wheel support is purely internal so doesn't count.