[Distutils] Package Meta-information Patch

[Michael Muller]

Greg Ward wrote:
[snip]
> many files in many directories.  To find information about all
> module distributions installed, you troll sys.path, looking for a
> "_pkginfo" subdirectory in each entry, and then look at the files
> installed there.  At least, that's the understanding I get from reading
> your message and a cursory scan of the patch -- am I right?

Actually, I was kind of stuck on the problem of what to do about multiple
locations in sys.path, but now that you mention it, this sounds like a good
approach :-).

> What I'm a little leery about is using Python code as a data format.
> It's attractive because we all know the syntax and don't have to write a
> parser.  But using a general-purpose language for *such* a specific,
> tightly-targeted task seems ... I dunno ... overkill-ish.  And I wonder
> if there are security holes lurking in the concept of using code for
> system catalog data.

I'm a little leery about this also - that's partly why I isolated this code
within the pkginfo module.  You should really be able to use whatever
meta-info repository that you want, providing that only _one_ is used on a
particular system.

The reason I went with the Python code approach is that it was extremely easy
to write and debug (it's always easier to see what's going on when the data
itself is readable), and because it was the only format that I was _absolutely
certain_ would be available on every platform that would be using distutils. 
Also, there's the fact that with Python code, the interpreter is written in C
- it will run significantly faster than any code that could be written in
Python.

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