[Distutils] PEP 345

[Chris Withers]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>>> A quick scan of http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0345/ shows no sign of
>>>> any of the contentious bits of PEP390. What am I missing?
>>> That's the part I have not added yet. Markers are the "sys_platform ==
>>> 'win32" things
>>> discussed in PEP 390.
>> But PEP345 is about the metadata that appears in the installed package, no?
>>
>> What use is it having conditionals in there at all?
> 
> Because we want to add the PEP 390 context dependent markers in there,
> as explained in PEP 390 (I've updated it yesterday, have a look)
> 
> It provides the markers to any third party app that wants to read the metadata,
> and make it avaiable directly at PyPI.

I can understand the latter, but the former seems pointless.

Comments on 345:

- Requires/Provides seems like a bad idea. I'm pretty sure distributions 
are the only thing that should be involved in Requirements and the only 
things that should have versions. Why not just abandon Requires and 
Provides and have Requires-Dist and Provides-Dist instead?

- Obsoletes/Obsoletes-Dist seems unlikely to be used. If it was called 
"Incompatible-With" it'd make more sense. eg: for Setuptools and Distribute

- having Provides-Dist as a multiple use seems wrong. How can one 
distribution contain multiple distributions? Seems like a bad idea to 
me, even if it were possible...


Comments on 390:

- how come the section about metadata references PEP 314 and not 345?

- as others have commented, having ; be a special character in fields 
which are already free text feels like it might be brittle.

- you already know how thrilled I am about the proposed metadata format ;-)

> That's from this summer: some folks found the scheme overcomplex
> and dont want to see it as the standard. I am working in finding back
> the details.

Look forward to hearing about that, since it's the least contentious of 
all the proposed changes and it'd be great to get it into the next 
release(s) of python...

Chris

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