[Distutils] [RFC] Recentering the static metadata need : PKG-INFO

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hey,

Marc-André Lemburg gave me a key points about the static metadata
discussions we have (wether its PEP 390 or around it)

He said that the important thing was to have the context-dependant
markers in PKG-INFO, and that having in described in
setup.cfg or in setup.py by any way is not the important thing. And he
is right !

So, PEP 390 proposes a new setup.cfg format, that's fine. And others
are thinking about other ways to build metadata, that's great.

But what really matters at the end is to provide a new Metadata format
where these marker are present, so any consumer
can play with them (and Distutils provide an API to play with them :
the DistributionMetadata class)

So please, have a look at the new section I've added here with the
syntax I am proposing :

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0390/#impact-on-pkg-info-generation-and-pep-314

That will probably re-center the debate in creating a Metadata 1.2
format that includes these markers.

As someone asked, here is the principal uses cases of having static
metadata that includes markers like this:

- pip, or easy_install, or any client code, will be able to query
PyPI, to get the metadata of a package. *and*
  will be able to have it depending on a particular environment.

- it will be possible to generate and provide alongside the source
code the PKG-INFO file, like how install_egg_info does
  at installation time, exactly like how MANIFEST is built.

If that sounds like the right path (it does to me), we could start to
work on a PEP 314 update, and add in the
work what was started last year:

- revision of "requires", "obsoletes", etc..
- link to PEP 386

Regards
Tarek