[Distutils] Plugins for the MANIFEST file

[P.J. Eby]

At 02:33 PM 4/8/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 14:23, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
> > I want *less* stuff (ideally nothing) spelled in imperative Python, with
> > some common declarative file replacing both the information currently in
> > setup.py and MANIFEST.in.  I thought we were in agreement that
> > non-introspectable metadata was a Bad Thing(TM)?
> >
> >  http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/StaticMetadata
>
>For me, the important part is that it's not spread around many files.
>I would also tend to prefer some INI-type file format than python
>code. On the other hand, python code offers benefits such as being
>able to dynamically change the data depending on things like module
>availability and python version, etc.

That's why my preference is to make the static format oriented for 
machine-readability rather than human read/write ability.  It should 
then also be possible to generate the static format from Python or 
from other formats, and to define a standard around either setup.py 
commands or something else to let an installer tool request 
generation of the static data.

Like WSGI, the lingua franca needn't be pretty, just 
well-defined.  Heck, I'd almost be willing to use XML for the file 
format, since XML would make it easy to tag files with multiple 
pieces of information, such as "this is generated documentation that 
should be installed" vs. "this is documentation source *and* should 
also be installed" (e.g. a README.txt that's also reSTified to 
HTML).  XML also allows the markup vocabulary to be extended, and 
unrecognized markup to be ignored, so that tagging files as 
"installable" in the general case could allow a dumber installer to 
just install them without needing to know if they're docs or data or 
message catalogs or what.

That being said, if there was a better format than XML (for 
appropriate values of "better"; i.e. YAML and JSON don't count), I'd 
be happy with that too.