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

[Paul Moore]

On 12 February 2013 14:54, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes you have my permission to put wheel infrastructure in core. Just do a
> good job at it :-)

The wheel spec mandates metadata format 1.2 or later in the PKG-INFO
file. At the moment, distutils
(distribution.dist.DistributionMetadata) only writes format versions
1.0 or 1.1. I see no reason to *not* reuse existing core code, but
equally I don't particularly intend myself to add metadata 1.3 support
to distutils.

I would hope that when PEP 426 is accepted, distutils will be updated
to allow writing of Metadata 1.3 format. At that point my bdist_wheel
code can use it. (Given that PEP 427 *requires* 1.2 or later, it might
be necessary for distutils to grow a "minimum version to use" flag
somehow, but that's not a big deal). Otherwise, adding wheel support
to distutils doesn't seem credible...

Personally, I think that making distutils (or at least *somewhere* in
the core) offer metadata 1.3 format output should be a requirement for
accepting PEP 426.

Paul