[Distutils] entry points PEP

[Paul Moore]

On 18 July 2013 14:03, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> Abstract
>
> This PEP proposes a way to represent the setuptools “entry points”
> feature in standard Python metadata. Entry points are a useful
> mechanism for advertising or discovering plugins or other exported
> functionality without having to depend on the module namespace. Since
> the feature is used by many existing Python distributions and not
> everyone wants to use setuptools, it is useful to have a way to
> represent the functionality that is not tied to setuptools itself.
>

1. I think that console (and GUI) scripts should be top-level metadata, not
an extension. Installers need to be able to create wrappers based on these,
and it is useful data for introspection.

2. distlib calls these "exports" and I think that's a better name. But if
names are all that we argue over, I'm happy :-)

3. Someone (I think it was PJE) pointed out that having entry points in a
separate metadata file was good because it allowed a fast check of "does
this distribution expose entry points?" Note that this isn't a useful thing
to check for script wrappers, which again argues that those should be
handled separately.

4. You seem to have an extra set of curly braces in a few places. You say
the value of "entry_points" is a dictionary, but you show it as a set
containing one dictionary in the set (and of course sets aren't valid
JSON). I'll assume this is just a typo, and you meant

{ …
  “extensions”: {
    “entry_points” : {
      “sqlalchemy.dialects” : [ “mysql = sqlalchemy_mysql:base.dialect”] ,
      ...
    }
  }
}

5. What's the logic for having the values (I don't see a good term for
these - the "mysql = ..." bit above) be a structured string that the user
has to parse? Either it should be completely free format (which I suspect
makes it of limited use for introspection, if nothing else) or it should be
broken up into JSON - no point in having a blob of data that needs parsing
in the middle of an already structured format!

Paul
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