[Catalog-sig] Tasks arising from IPC9

[Andrew Kuchling]

Various events related to the Catalog- and Distutils-SIG happened at
IPC9 this past week.  To summarize them:

* Sean Reifschneider demonstrated swalow during the Lightning Talks
  session and got a favorable reaction from the attendees.

* Packaging was discussed at Paul Prescod's BoF session, and some
  decisions were made there.  (More about that below...)

* On Developer's Day, Moshe turned over half of his "Batteries Included" 
  session to me for catalog discussion, and a few more items were
  added to the task list.

So, here's the plan of action:

1) For 2.1final, change the Distutils sdist command to construct a
   text file containing the metadata for a package.  Exactly *what*
   metadata to collect was left open for subsequent discussion on the
   Catalog-SIG.  (Amos has a patch to implement this that I'll look at
   when I can.)  

   This is the only thing to be done in time for 2.1, so it's the only
   really pressing task.

2) Once that metadata support is there, someone can start running an 
   experimental swalow server and begin adding to its database.
   If Python 2.2 comes along in 6-12 months, that should be enough
   time to have an idea of what should go into 2.2 to support it.
  
3) Other Distutils changes would be to design and create a package
   database, and implement an uninstall command.  The 'sdist' command
   would also grow an --upload or --register option that would
   automatically submit the package to the catalog (but first we'd need
   to finalize how that should be done).

I'll make a separate post to start the metadata discussion.

--amk