[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[David Cournapeau]

Chris Withers wrote:
> The thing is, there's just no need for all this code to be in setup.py.
>
> For me, anything more than:
>
> from xxx import setup
> setup()
>
> ...in the case where all the information is in setup.cfg is totally
> unacceptable.

FWIW, I have played a bit with something in that direction - this is not
a suggestion for anything at that point, just a toy prototype to play
with some ideas I have concerning a new distribution tool in python:

http://github.com/cournape/toydist

The basis is a static file format, but richer that the proposed PEP 390:
    - the goal is to be able to describe fully a package from the static
data: meta-data, packages, doc, extensions, etc...
    - converting from existing setup.py to a static file is possible
through an API (one could have a distutils command to automatically
generate such a file)
    - a two lines toysetup.py can build basic packages from an existing
toysetup.info static file
    - for the majority of packages out there (the ones which do not
extend distutils, basically), the passage setup.py -> toysetup.info ->
toysetup.py should be "lossless". This is huge IMHO, because it provides
a transition to a system which does not depend on distutils anymore.

An example of the static file is:

"""
Name: hello
Version: 1.0

Library:
    BuildRequires: paver, sphinx, numpy
    if os(windows)
        BuildRequires: pywin32
    Packages:
        hello
    Extension: hello._bar
        sources:
            src/hellomodule.c
    if os(linux)
        Extension: hello._linux_backend
            sources:
                src/linbackend.c
"""

The corresponding setup.py is simply:

"""
from distutils.core import setup
from toydist import parse_static

info_dict = parse_static('toysetup.info').to_dict()
setup(**info_dict)
"""

The format is basically a rip-of from cabal (haskell distribution
format) at this point,

cheers,

David