On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Agreed, and this is the kind of thing a v1.3 metadata PEP could
define. It just needs to be properly namespaced, and the obvious
namespacing mechanism is PyPI project names.

The biggest reason I have against namespacing them is it makes

moving from experimental to standard easier, but I'm ok with some

form of a namespace. The biggest reason I see against using PyPI

names as the namespace is it needlessly ties a piece of data to

the original creator. Similar to how right now you could write a

less hacky setuptools, but in order to do so you need to continue

to use the setuptools package name (see distribute). Using PyPI

names means that in the requires-dist example it would be something

like setuptools-requires-dist, and even if I make my own tool that

supports the same concept as setuptools's requires-dist I would

need to use setuptools-requires-dist.

The concept of metadata I think should be divorced from specific

implementations. Obviously there are going to be some implementation

specific issues but I think it's much cleaner to have a x-requires-dist

that any implementation can use than to have whoever-invented-it-first-requires-dist

or a twenty-different-forms-of-requires-dist.