[Distutils] .ini vs JSON vs YAML meta data format (Was: Simplify 426: Deprecate Author-email and Maintainer-email)

[anatoly techtonik]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would prefer to see PEP 390 withdrawn and I think this has been
> suggested before. The metadata is already sourced from different files
> depending on your build system.
>
> The .ini format and our parsers for it are really awful. I always
> resented having to learn it in order to use distutils/setuptools when
> every other language (RFC822, Python, JSON) is both better and already
> familiar.
>

Everyone here has an excellent user stories. I am stunned that there is not
process to help PEP authors collect them? Original user stories are much
better to learn and draft new standards than when reworked into PEP
specification text.


> FWIW bdist_wheel does something half-PEP-390 inspired with setup.cfg:
>
> [metadata]
> provides-extra =
>     tool
>     signatures
>     faster-signatures
> requires-dist =
>     distribute (>= 0.6.34)
>     argparse; python_version == '2.6'
>     keyring; extra == 'signatures'
>     dirspec; sys.platform != 'win32' and extra == 'signatures'
>     ed25519ll; extra == 'faster-signatures'
> license-file = LICENSE.txt
>
> (https://bitbucket.org/dholth/wheel/src/tip/setup.cfg?at=default)


Why reinvent own format when there is already YAML with indented sections?
Yes, I have to see examples to write in this format, but it is readable and
familiar across a broad range of products. It is better than JSON at least,
because it doesn't require to wrap anything in quotes.
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