[Distutils] RFC822, PKG-INFO and the Description field

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Ronny Pfannschmidt
<Ronny.Pfannschmidt at gmx.de> wrote:
[..]
>
> How about turning that file into a real mime message instead of just a
> set of pseudo mime headers with some pseudo encodings for multiline
> stuff.
>
> That way the long description could be the body of that message,
> no more messy recoding needed.
>
> As far as i can tell, all the other optional fields are designed to fit
> single lines anyway.
>

The problem is, we may have in the future more multi-line fields so I think we
should not use a message-like body.

It's not a big problem if PKG-INFO looks messy, as long as we provide APIs
to write *and* read it.

Notice that there is not official consumers for this file yet as far as I know,
PyPI reads the metadata from a form that is pushed by the register command
and stores it in its own format.

OTHO we could drop RFC 822 completely and go for a simpler format like
json for 1.2..

I am not sure how many third party applications this will impact but I
don't think there are
so many. In any case, they will have to adapt themselves for 1.2, so
maybe keeping a RFC 822-like
format is less annoying for them.

Regards
Tarek