[Distutils] setup.cfg new format proposal

[Jim Fulton]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/11  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com>:
>> On 02:33 pm, ziade.tarek at gmail.com wrote:
>> I'm a little skeptical about creating a new mini language (particularly one
>> with branching) for setup.cfg,

Me too.

>> but I haven't really been paying close
>> attention to this discussion.

Me neither. :)

>>  Still, it might be good to give a brief
>> summary of the justification for this someplace.  Maybe you were already
>> planning to do that.
>
> The idea is to be able to get with setup.cfg all the metadata without running
> any code from the distribution, and without installing it.
>
> Which is possible for most cases. (if not possible, setup.py  can still be used)
>
> the mini-language is to be able to adapt these metadata depending on
> the execution context. I'll add a doc somewhere.

Is that really necessary?  I mean, if you have to adapt the meta data
to the execution context, maybe you should fall back to writing a
setup.py.

I agree that more background and motivational information would be
very helpful, as would some real world examples. I know that >90%
(maybe 99% :) of the packages I distribute don't adapt to their
execution context (beyond what distutils does internally) or need
anything but meta data.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton