[Distutils] PEP 426 updated (with more than you ever wanted to know about version schemes)

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 6:25 PM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>> PEPs 426 and 427 between them should achieve the first objective,
>> while the other parts of PEP 426 should get us a long way towards
>> achieving the second (with "./setup.py bdist_wheel" as the interim
>> build hook, pending the introduction of anything better in a PEP for a
>> clarified sdist format).
>
> How far do you want to standardize the sdist format? For the goals you
> mentioned earlier you'd only have to specify that an sdist contains
> a configuration file that says which builder should be used. It might be
> nice if the full PKG-INFO contents were also available to extract some
> metadata without invoking the builder.

The sdist format already requires PKG-INFO - it just needs to be
documented *as* a standard format, rather than implied by "what
distutils creates when you call 'setup.py sdist'". PEP 426 actually
takes a fairly big step in that direction already by declaring that
sdist archives should contain a PKG-INFO file that follows PEP 426
(see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0426/#metadata-files)

The missing piece is a standard hook for invoking the builder to
create a wheel. Currently, that would be via "./setup.py bdist_wheel",
but we want to get away from the setup.py format.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia