[Distutils] PEP 241 draft

[Amos Latteier]

Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> I've checked in a first draft of PEP 241.  Here it is; please offer
> comments and changes.

Looks good.

>     Authors might expect to include a METADATA file of their own that
>     would be used instead of the generated file, but this will not be
>     permitted.

Important point!

>     XXX are we sure RFC-822 is enough?
>     The METADATA file format is a single set of RFC-822 headers
>     parseable by the rfc822.py module.  The field names listed in the
>     following section are used as the header names.

I agree that if meta-data is a flat list of names and values then rfc822
is probably fine.
 
>     Name
> 
>       The name of the package.  XXX what's the set of legal characters?

Why should the legal characters be restricted? OK, no newlines, but
otherwise what do we care?

>     Author (optional) 
>     Author-email

Should we allow more than one contact email address? For example, there
may be multiple authors, or there may be some other relevant contact
email addresses.

>     Keywords
> 
>       A list of additional keywords to be used to assist searching
>       for this package in a larger catalog.
> 
>       XXX Keywords should probably be constrained to be from a fixed
>       list, but I don't think this can be enforced by the 'sdist'
>       command.  (The list might be large, and it could only be updated
>       with new Distutils releases, which seems too inflexible.)
> 
>       Example: 'dog puppy voting election'

It might be more useful to have categories like CPAN's categories

  http://cpan.org/modules/by-category/

or Source Forge's 'Trove' categories
 
  http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php

of the Vaults of Parnassus's categories

  http://www.vex.net/parnassus/apyllo.py?a=tree

Your example keywords could probably be extracted from the description
and long description and used by search engines when indexing. I'm not
sure keywords are needed if we have full text description and long
description.

Categories, on the other hand, help not with searching so much as
browsing.

-Amos

--
Amos Latteier         mailto:amos@digicool.com
Digital Creations     http://www.digicool.com