[Distutils] Simplify 426: Deprecate Author-email and Maintainer-email

[Vinay Sajip]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> splitting them is the right way to go, and also that a multi-file
> input format is likely a better option than trying to cram everything
> into one file.

There are areas of overlap, if you consider "archiver", "builder" and
"installer" roles. For example, the source files and in-package data are
needed by both builder and archiver. The beauty of JSON is that it allows you
to have your cake and eat it, to an extent. For example, if you consider that
inputs to the different roles are dicts, it's not a big deal if you have a
higher-level dict which contains the others as sub-dicts. So I don't see a
big issue with having one file as long as the schema is clearly defined so
that a specific role could pull out the relevant stuff.

Also note that in the PEP 397 implementation (dictConfig) there is already
the ability to have cross-references to shared sections in a dict serialised
as JSON, so there's no need to compromise on DRY even when there are data
overlaps.

I've added some support for dict-based configuration in distlib (a backport
of the generic configuration stuff from 2.7/3.2 dictConfig, to support 2.6)
but the use of that's not yet documented.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip