[Distutils] Metadata fields

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 01:11:54PM -0800, Amos Latteier wrote:
>Andrew Kuchling wrote:
>> What's the distinction?  Maybe: description is a single line, and
>> long_description is one or more full paragraphs?
>
>Exactly. Having both is useful since often the name is not enough to
>descriptively identify a package. It is often useful to have a one line

I'd recommend either using "Summary" and "Description", or
"Short-Description" and "Description".  To me, the word "description"
does not imply an 80-character limitation...

>> <light bulb goes on> Good point!  It probably shouldn't, since the
>> metadata tells you about the package that you have right here as a
>> tarball/RPM/whatever and the package doesn't need to know where it's
>> supposed to live on the Web.

I'd agree there.

>I'm not sure what you mean by Python package database. In general, it

There were talks at the conference about how it's likely that we'll need
some sort of package database for handling installs and uninstalls or
Python modules/packages...

>will be hard to put meta-data in a binary distribution in a way that the
>catalog can easily retrieve it. So I agree that metadata goes in source

Metadata can be delivered out-of-band.  For example, when writing the
.tar.gz (or whatever), we could also write a ".mta" (or whatever)
file of the same base name containing the meta-data.  On the trip back
I wrote some code for directly extracting the meta-data out of a .tar.*
file, but it's easy enough to deal with getting the meta-data submitted
seperately.

I don't see any way of not providing the meta-data for binary packages
(like trying to use the source meta-data instead), because we'll have
to know things like:

	Architecture
	Platform-Name
	Platform-Version

for binaries.

>This seems reasonable to me. Also it doesn't matter if for some reason
>your email address is different for different packages you release. So
>long as you let the catalog know about all your email addresses, things

It'd be nice to have some way that users could override that if, for
example, they use different e-mail addresses for each package (as I often
do), or there is a collision for some other reason...  I don't think that
using the e-mail address is unreasonable though...

Sean
-- 
 ISA isn't dead, it's just that people wish it were.  The correct term for
 this condition is "legacy"...  --  Sean Reifschneider, 1999
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
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