[Distutils] Pre-pre-PEP: Requirements for the Python BUILDS Specification

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 12:35:11PM -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> I'm thinking about putting together a pre-PEP for a "Build Utilities,  
> Installation Locations, & Distribution Standards" (BUILDS)  
> specification.

Hehe, clever name!

> The basic idea for the first PEP is to:
[...]
> 2. Comment on some lessons learned from the WSGI definition process and 
> WSGI in the field, and how they can be applied to the BUILDS process

That will be interesting to read.  Not being a web developer I have no
idea how WSGI came to be and what exactly it does.

[...]
> 4. Lay out *non-goals* for the BUILDS project,
[...]
> or doing anything that requires  
> them to change the runtime contents of their projects (as opposed to  
> merely porting their setup.py, setup.cfg, etc.)

Does this mean actively avoiding an API that would allow developers to
access certain types of data files (I'm thinking of the discussion
about locale data and not putting anything else but .py/.pyc/.pyo
files in packages) or merely making sure the existing way (of shipping
data files in packages and finding them by os.path and __file__) keeps
working?


> 5. Define rigorous terminology to be used for discussion of requirements 
> and design, including such terms as "project", "release", "distribution", 
> "system package", "installed distribution", etc.  (This is incredibly 
> important, because the discussions we're having now are already having 
> Tower-of-Babel confusions.)

Yay, please make sure the terminology finally allows us to talk about
packages in the .deb and .rpm meaning too.  The current distutils
terminology doesn't and it really doesn't help.


> I also think we're going to 
> want a working group for this, or maybe multiple working groups, and it 
> might be best not to use the general distutils-SIG for discussion past 
> the first PEP, to allow people to filter threads better.

Hmm, this all seems quite on topic for distutils-sig.


Regards
Floris

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