[Distutils] Upcoming changes to PEP 426/440

[Gabriel de Perthuis]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:52:46 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> On Jun 30, 2013, at 6:51 PM, Gabriel de Perthuis <g2p.code at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:46:51 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
>>> On Jun 30, 2013, at 6:39 PM, Gabriel de Perthuis <g2p.code at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> So it would prefer that dev and test be extras with well known names,
>>>> so that dev, test, and any other extras define dependencies with a
>>>> minimum of ambiguity and without the need for a second level of
>>>> qualifiers.
>>> 
>>> "Well known names" is way more ambiguous than a top level field.
>>> It's easy to have minor variances across various packages, "test" vs
>>> "tests", "docs", "doc", "documentation". Both top level and "kind"
>>> share the fact that there is a limited number of allowed names,
>>> which makes it simple to validate that the same name is being used
>>> everywhere (because anything outside of those limited numbers are
>>> rejected).
>> 
>> These well-known names would also have some tool support.
>> Something like `pip install-dev` would be sufficient.
>> 
> But when defining them, it's very easy to accidentally use "tests"
> instead of "test".

A lint tool can warn about these names, and a PyPI server could even
block them for new-style packages.