[Distutils] .egg-info metadata

[PJ Eby]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been chatting to Chris McDonough a bit as well, and one
>> potentially useful thing would be to clearly document the
>> setuptools/distribute metadata precisely as it is generated today.

The official docs for all egg formats can be found at:

  http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats

And they answer most of your questions.  A few call-outs below:

> dependency_links.txt: url's of the package's dependencies. Speak up if
> you use this; it is very surprising, and has a much better replacement
> with pip --index options and requirements files.

No, actually, those are not replacements at all, let alone better
ones.  They're for a package's supplier to offer third-party builds to
fulfill requirements not available via PyPI.  E.g. the author of
package Foo offers unofficial Windows builds of package Bar, and
includes dependency links so that those dependencies can be fulfilled
even if not present on PyPI.

> Provides works the same way in setuptools, it is in PKG-INFO.

Setuptools doesn't actually use Provides.

Lexical formats of the files are described in terms of pkg_resources
API calls -- these calls (and more precise syntax documentation) are
documented here:

  http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PkgResources

Mainly in the "Parsing Utilities" section:

  http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PkgResources#parsing-utilities