[Distutils] PEP 241 draft

[Juergen Hermann]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2001 15:06:11 -0500, Andrew Kuchling wrote:

>This could equally be done by people who need the XML form; it would
>be a few lines of code:
>
>metadata =3D rfc822.Message(open('METADATA'))
>print "<root><name>%s</name>..." % (metadata['name'], ...)
>
>Since the RFC-822 parser is already written, we don't gain anything by
>having to write a SAX or xmllib handler... *unless* someone shows that
>we need the ability of XML to encode full-blown trees.  I currently
>believe we don't need that, but will listen to a good argument.

I too believe that RFC822 is better for plain name/value pairs, 
especially since RFC822 is more available (Python 1.5).

BUT (now comes the but ;), I believe we should define a _standard_ 
format (or even better, describe the _standard_ conversion of distutils =

RFC822 metadata into a predefined XML DTD) for XML usage.

Concrete sample uses of this: if we have a cpyan server, it could 
generate automatically a xml export of all the stored packages (or 
subsets thereof) so that clients can get summarized package data via 
SOAP or XMLRPC. This requires standardization.


Ciao, J=FCrgen

--
J=FCrgen Hermann, Developer (jhe@webde-ag.de)
WEB.DE AG, http://webde-ag.de/