[Distutils] setup.cfg new format proposal

[David Lyon]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:01:20 -0400, "P.J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com>
wrote:
> It's not the application's business what the installation directory 
> is; 

Yes, but it very much is.

An application needs to know what directory it has been installed
in and where it can find configuration files and so forth.

See the concurrent thread, about sphinx documentation generation.

It's a valid issue.

> certainly it's not an issue for the "static metadata" use case, 

Correct.

> nor is it something that should be specified in setup.py or 
> setup.cfg, as that is 100% the user's business to choose, and the 
> platform tools to supply a default for.

Well, it certainly doesn't work that way at the moment.

> I suspect there is some confusion here; I'm precisely suggesting that 
> we not invent a new, general wheel if we can address the real use 
> cases with a slight adjustment to something we already have (e.g. the 
> extras syntax).

Yes, there's much confusion. That's the problem, in addition to many
annoying limitations and shortcomings.

So if you want to go ahead and describe what needs to be done in\
nice simple easy to understand terms it would benefit everyone.

David