[Distutils] Storing metadata in XML vs. RFC-822 (Re: Distutils-SIG digest, Vol 1 #478 - 13 msgs)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Alexandre Fayolle wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Paul Prescod 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.

I think this discussion is going overboard here... the metadata
file will be generated by distutils, so the format is really
secondary -- no human will read the file, so it can basically
be any format you want it to.

Please let's get on with defining the important parts first,
i.e. which keywords to include and how the values should be
formatted. The backend format can then be implemented in whatever
machine readable format is suitable, be it XML or RFC-822 style
headers. We can even change the format at some later point,
since regenerating it will be easy.

BTW, I don't remember having seen this in the discussion so
far, but I think that we will definitely also need a version
field for the metadata format itself (or maybe simply the
distutils version which the package assumes being installed --
this can then be used to track the meta data format).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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