[Distutils] Python people want CPAN and how the latter came about

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Tue Dec 22 09:11:38 CET 2009


2009/12/22 Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 02:07, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> But there is much more than what PEP 314 defines. Think about
>> everything which is in an egg, for example. How are files locations
>> are described, how are files outside site-packages described, etc...
>
> What do you mean "how"?

This is answered in my another email (build manifest and eggs).

>
>> As a concrete example, there is not enough metadata in every installer
>> so that you can convert from one to the other, even though this would
>> be very useful and definitely possible.
>
> This I don't understand. What do you mean with "installer"? What kind
> of conversions do you refer to?

By installer, I mean things produced by bdist_*. A significant portion
of windows users don't like eggs, and prefer .exe-based (or
.msi-based) installers. Currently, it is not possible to (reliably)
convert from one to the other (e.g. eggs->wininst), but there is no
reason why this is so.

>
>> For example, you can upload a distribution which does not even have a
>> name, or a version, easy_install tries to find tarballs by scrapping
>> webpages, etc...
>
> Well, if you like your distribution to be called UNKNOWN-0.0, then I
> guess you can. But you also get warnings like this:
>
> warning: sdist: standard file not found: should have one of README, README.txt
> warning: sdist: missing required meta-data: name, url
> warning: sdist: missing meta-data: either (author and author_email) or
> (maintainer and maintainer_email) must be supplied
>
> In my opinion that's your problem of you ignore those

You are not wrong, but we are not talking about the same scenario. The
scenario I care the most is user A build or install a package, and
user B wants to install it; A may know very little about python.

David


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