[Distutils] PEP 376 and the name .egg-info?

Kevin Teague kevin at bud.ca
Tue Mar 24 02:11:16 CET 2009


I have some confusion over the name .egg-info. From what I understand,  
Eggs are a packaging format that contain metadata. But if you take a  
Distutils installed package and put a .egg-info file or directory  
beside it, that doesn't make the package an Egg, does it?

To add to this confusion, I always associate the Egg format with the  
additional metadata fields provided by setuptools. So when I see .egg- 
info I always expect that the PKG-INFO will contain an  
'install_requires' field, etc. It would be more understandable (to me)  
if this directory was named .pkg-info, .metadata, .install or  
something. But then I guess that's a somewhat disruptive change for  
small gains.

An alternative to bridging the disconnect between the setuptools  
metadata fields and the distutils metadata fields would be to add the  
setuptools fields to distutils as standard package metadata. Adding  
those metadata fields hasn't been propsed yet as it's own PEP, has it?

I guess that PEP would entail a little more work than just managing a  
set of fields since PyPI would also need to be updated to display  
those fields. But it would be really lovely to be able to see the  
'install_requires' field when browsing PyPI - and click on links in  
that field to take you to those pakcages PyPI pages. And as an added  
bonus if the 'namespace_packages' field was clickable such that the  
link took you to a list of all packages which participated in that  
namespace, that'd be pretty sweet!



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