[Distutils] easy_install: application description files

[Ian Bicking]

Are there currently any thoughts about application descriptions?

For reasons actually unrelated to easy_install, I'm going to be adding 
files describing applications at work.  These files contain all sorts of 
company-specific metadata.  I'd like to include descriptions of 
dependencies, for use by various tools (or maybe just by easy_install, 
should it do everything I want).

Right now all the metadata goes in setup(), which is perhaps okay, but 
requires distutils/setuptools to implement all the features, because the 
file itself isn't (realistically) parseable without running it.  But in 
this context an ini file would probably be better.  Phillip, I know you 
like the ini files, so you must have something in mind for this.  I'm 
not seeing anything particular in the documentation, though.

Or do I put everything in setup() and use some of the files produced by 
that?  I see .egg-info/requires.txt contains the requirement information 
(BTW, it's missing a trailing newline).  Should I just use that 
directory as my application-metadata storage area?  Would I add that 
directory to my repository?  If so, is it recommended I ignore 
top_level.txt and requires.txt as derivative?

Completely unrelated, easy_install installs executable .pyc files.  Is 
that intended?  They actually don't seem to be .pyc files either, just 
copies of the .py files.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org