[Distutils] PEP 426: proposed change to extension fields + entry points

[Daniel Holth]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 12:59 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 12:38 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> > I'm probably the only one but I'm not a fan of JSON with all the
> extra "
> >> > marks compared to the venerable, lovely, flatter and much easier to
> edit
> >> > Key: value format.
> >>
> >> I don't really care that much about human readability of the raw
> >> metadata files, I care a lot more about ease of interoperability for
> >> automated tools, and ease of display for generic tools that may not
> >> understand the semantics. I also care about the standard format being
> >> amenable to the publication of metadata through TUF's JSON based
> >> infrastructure.
> >
> >
> > When I see that file I've always thought "why aren't we writing these by
> > hand instead of through setup.py and then validating that they are
> correct
> > with a tool?" Bento's file sortof follows this logic. I can accept JSON.
>
> That's a similar question to the one the distutils2 folks asked before
> coming up with setup.cfg. The reason I think we need to assume a
> generated file rather than a hand-edited one is because, for the vast
> majority of Python users, for the foreseeable future, their static
> metadata is going to be generated by running a setup.py file. For most
> others, it's going to be generated from either setup.cfg or from
> bento.info.


Well this is a rabbit hole. setup.cfg is what you get when the metadata
devolves into "the arguments passed to setup()". Perhaps that is the real
reason I don't like JSON that much; the temptation would be to make it
nothing more than the argument dict to setup() and that ties us to
distutils.

It is true that setup.py is where METADATA comes from usually but the
file's origin has to not matter by the time you are installing.
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