[Distutils] New draft of PEP, and list of licenses

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> Subject: Re: [Distutils] New draft of PEP, and list of licenses

> The examples should have the field names in them, as in the Author
> example above.
> 
>    Example:
>       Metadata-Version: 1.0
>       Name: BeagleVote
>       Version: 1.0a2
>       Summary: A module for collecting votes from beagles.
>       Description: This module collects votes from beagles in order to
>          determine their electoral wishes.
>          
>          Do NOT try to use this module with basset hounds; it makes
>          them grumpy.
>       Keywords: dog puppy voting election
>       Home-page: http://www.example.com/~cschultz/bvote/
>       Author: C. Schultz
>               Universal Features Syndicate
>               Los Angeles, CA
>       Author-email: "C. Schultz" <cschultz@example.com>
>       License: Python

Seing this laid out like this, I think we need the addition of
"Revision" to indicate the version of the setup.py/distutils
configuration stuff. There are a lot of times where the actual
software doesn't change but the packaging process does. It
would be important to know that BeagleVote 1.0a2 package
revision 1 (which, say, the packager didn't include doc files)
is different from package revision 2 (which did).

Since distutils allows anyone to make a package, this may need
to be a derived field. Maybe based on packager, since the
same module could be packaged by multiple packagers.  Also,
hardcoded revisions in setup.py wouldn't make much sense, since
the packager would be likely to leave it unchanged regardless
of how many times they change the package. It would be best if
it was a required command line option to the bdist* commands.

This is all based on the way things work these days, where
the package author is not necessarily (or even likely) to
be the packager. If distutils gets broadly accepted, and
most authors use it, this gets less significant. If you
want to be broadly optimistic about distutils acceptance,
ignore this suggestion (I'm not sure I'm convinced it's
needed.)

(I also don't see the packager information above, but I thought
it was in the PEP. If it's not, it probably should be as well.
Just name and email.)

mwa