[Distutils] RFC-822 or XML?

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 01:20:37PM +0100, Alexandre Fayolle wrote:
>> I didn't really intend for it to be anything complex.
>> 
>> for name in metadatanames:
>> 	print "<"+name.lower()+">"+content+"</"+name.lower()+">"
>> 
>> Maybe it is intrisically more complex them I am thinking...
>
>You'd need at least to escape '&' and '<' in content. 

Indeed, and in the simple hack for 2.1, how should a field like:

Long-description: <a><b>Messed-up tags</a></b> 

be handled?  If <>& aren't escaped, this will generate invalid XML; if
they are escaped, you can't represent a structured description anyway.

I really, *really* think an XML format buys us nothing in the 2.1 time
frame.  An extensible format buys us nothing at this point since there
will be no switch or override way to specify additional fields.
Unicode would be missing, but CPAN's gotten this far without either
Unicode or the ability to have multiple authors, and we can get along
without them for 6 months.

I'd also really like to get this checked in by next Monday, and am
noting the tendency toward feature creep starting.  Support for
versioncheck and multiple authors and such things are all good ideas,
but they'll require writing more code, and we're already at the beta
stage, so I'm really anxious to minimize the changes.  Shall we simply
vote on the issue?  RFC-822 or simple XML (from Paul's algorithm cited
above)? +/-1, +/- 0 voting, as on python-dev.

--amk