[Distutils] .egg-info metadata

[PJ Eby]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Donald Stufft <donald.stufft at gmail.com> wrote:
> And when you have 2 packages that both provides: tastypie? Which is a real
> world occurence.

Hey, I didn't say it would work in practice, I said it would work in
*theory*.  ;-)  The point was, if you only have to have something work
in theory, you can make much simpler design choices.


> I think at this point it's just a differing of opinion about
> wether that is a desirable trait for a system to have or not. Obviously
> I think not, and you I believe think it is.

It's not a matter of opinion whether the trait is desirable: I added
it because people actually desired it, not because I personally have
an opinion about it.  (I'm certainly not a frequent user of the
feature, myself.)  And the use case exists, even if you personally
don't have that use case.

IOW, people have in fact had the use case and desired the feature, so
framing it as a matter of opinion is wrong as a matter of fact.  ;-)

Now, I am not arguing that any particular metadata scheme *must*
support that use case.  I am simply pointing out that the use case
exists and hand-waving it away as a non-existent requirement is
pointless.  If you want to investigate who's using it and decide
whether you are okay with telling those people using it to find
another way to meet the use case, that's fine by me.

However, bear in mind that potentially every download of a package
using dependency links represents a user who would have to manually
handle some dependency downloads, and that the burden propagates to
packages *depending* on that package, not just the direct package.

(I suspect you will also find that dependency links are more likely to
be used in projects that are frequently downloaded; the whole point is
to save a lot of people time hunting down dependencies that would
otherwise be difficult to find.)

Anyway, the point is that arguing whether the use case is desirable
from a purity perspective, or necessary in an ideal world, is
irrelevant to the practical question of whether there should be an
official (or semi-official) way to support the use case in practice.

IOW, in theory, the use case is unnecessary and undesirable.  In
practice, it's not a theoretical question.  ;-)

You can say "We understand the use case, but no, we won't support it."
 I am only trying to point out that "we think this use case doesn't or
shouldn't exist" is not the same thing.

(And at the beginning, I was only trying to answer Daniel's questions
about the specs of existing .egg-info metadata.)