[Distutils] PEP 241 draft

[M.-A. Lemburg]

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

Agreed :-)
 
> >     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!

Can't we have arbitrary extra fields starting with e.g. 'X-MyHeader'
which are then application defined ? (Mail headers work this way.)
 
> >     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.

Agreed. 

About the format you indicate: I don't think that the quotes
around the values are necessary for RFC-822 (but could be wrong).
At least mail headers don't have quotes, so it's probably ok to
omit them.
 
> >     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?

Doesn't really matter as long as it's 7-bit, e.g. ASCII or UTF-7.
 
> >     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.

We could probably allow the value to be a comma separated list !?
 
> >     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.

Why not have both ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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