2009/7/6 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com>:
P.J. Eby wrote:
So, I'm +1 for no change (obviously), and +0 for "always .pydist in 3.x and always .egg-info in 2.x", whether the latter part is achieved by making distutils/pkgutil use a version-dependent extension, or by refusing to backport distutils/pkgutil to 2.x. I'm -1 for having .pydist ever appear on a 2.x Python, either via stdlib or backporting.
(These comments also apply for any name other than '.pydist'.)
Thanks for the explanation - Before this message I didn't fully grasp *how* installing a directory containing files that the other packages might not understand would help with the backwards compatibility problem.
Now I understand that aspect better (i.e. it isn't a matter of "setuptools won't change" but "the user might already have an old version of setuptools/pip/etc on their system, or be installing a package that uses an old version of one of those libraries for its installer"), I no longer think it is worth the hassle of trying to use a "prettier" name for the metadata directory. So +1 on keeping the same extension name and -1 on the idea of changing it to anything other than the existing ".egg-info".
I believe the idea of having different names in 2.x and 3.x would likely cause too many problems for simple bdist_* installers of modules that use only the common 2.x/3.x language subset, so I'm also -1 on that idea.
That suits me too. I'm happy for the name to stay as it is. Paul.