At 02:10 PM 10/1/2008 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

Proposals ========

this is also a synthezis of what I hurd, and some elements I have added to respect the needs that were expressed.

0/ a lot of work can be done to clean distutils, no matter what is decided (another PEP is built for that) cleanning, removing old-style code, testing

1/ let's change the Python Metadata , in order to introduce a better dependency system, by

- officialy introduce "install requires" and "test requires" metadata in there - mark "requires" as deprecated

2/ Let's move part of setuptools code in distutils, to respect those changes.

3/ let's create a simple convention : the metadata should be expressed in a python module called 'pkginfo.py' where each metadata is a variable.

that can be used by setup.py and therefore by any tool that work with it, even if it does not run a setup.py command.

This is simpler, this is cleaner. you don't have to run some setup magic to read them. at least some magic introduces by commands

I'm -1 on all of the above. I think we need a standard for tools interop (ala WSGI), not implementation tweaks for the existing tools. I also think that a concrete metadata format proposal is premature at this time; we've barely begun to gather -- let alone specify -- our requirements for that metadata. (Essentially, only version dependencies have been discussed, AFAICT.) There have been many people agreeing that the distutils are thoroughly broken and a new approach is needed; these proposals sound like minor tweaks to the existing infrastructure, rather than a way to get rid of it. So to me, the above doesn't seem like a synthesis of the threads that I've been reading.

4/ let's change PyPI to make it work with the new metadata and to enforce a few things

Enforcements: - a binary distribution cannot be uploaded if a source distrbution has not been previously provided for the version

Note that this doesn't allow closed-source packages to be uploaded; thus it would need to be a warning, rather than a requirement.

New features: - we should be able to download the metadata of a package without downloading the package - PyPI should display the install and test dependencies in the UI

It could only do this for specific binaries, since dependencies can be dynamic.