[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[Eric Smith]

David Lyon wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:26 +0200, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> The first one who mentioned the idea was Eric IIRC, then Matthias and
>> Tres worked on it.
> 
> Fine. They've been awfully quiet on distutils-sig lately :-)

Not so!

>> I just happen to be the one maintaining PEP 390 and I am trying to
> collect
>> ideas here because I am maintaining Distutils so I'll be the one  
>> will apply the changes there.
> 
> Sure. Well "collect" is a word that means different things to different 
> people. I'd suggest some caution with using that word internationally
> because in some places it really can mean just outright theft. I'm
> very sure that that isn't how you want others to interpret your
> working process. Please.. don't use that word like that..

I'm sure no offense was intended. I don't see how we can all know all 
possible words that might be construed as offensive.

But back to the matter at hand:

I don't see what David is proposing as being radical or even different 
from what we've been discussing: a single static file that contains 
enough metadata to describe what's in a distribution. This file needs to 
be extensible. The Distutils-SIG approach has been incremental, adding 
small parts. It seems he wants to go "big bang". I think that's fine, 
but it will be more difficult to migrate to, I fear.

He's proposing shipping an application in each distribution (his new 
setup.py) that processes that file to do installations. Sounds like a 
bootstrapper of sorts, and not so radical of an idea. This setup.py 
would use parts of existing distutils to do its work, where it can. I 
think a name other than setup.py would reduce confusion, but the idea 
seems practical.

I'd be interested to hear how this would interact with PyPI and buildout.

Eric.