[Distutils] Updated drafts of metadata 2.0 (PEP 426 and PEP 440)

[Paul Moore]

On 21 June 2013 00:24, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> > How close am I to reality here?
>
> Close, except that this is explicitly an "ecosystem first" plan, with the
> standard library playing catch up later. That's the big reason I sought
> (and received) agreement at this year's language summit for us to discuss
> and approve packaging related PEPs right here on distutils-sig rather than
> having to repost them to python-dev for ratification.
>
> The only "must have" on the list for 3.4 is the pip bootstrapping, and
> Richard and I hope to get that squared away at the PyCon AU sprints next
> month.
>

Thanks. My remaining concern is the "chicken and egg" question of how this
much richer metadata will get populated - things like dependency metadata
is only as useful as the accuracy of the information. Some of it can be
translated from existing legacy formats (notably setuptools) and hopefully
once Appendix A is completed, we'll have a better understanding of how that
will work, and how complete it will be.

As regards the actual PEP contents, my thoughts are basically:

- I'm +1 on the PEP as a whole. Most of it seems to be to be entirely
reasonable and an important step forward

- I don't have much personal use for the more complex items like semantic
dependencies, extras, hooks, etc, but I see no particular problems with them

- Thinking about what I *do* use, the most glaring omission is a specific
"supports Python 3" indicator. I know it's available in the classifiers,
and it may have already been discussed, but is there realistically any
benefit in formalising this? The environment markers section covers this
somewhat, but is it within the remit of the PEP to recommend how (or even
when) packages should declare what major versions of Python they support?
(And should installers be warning about attempts to install packages that
don't support the relevant Python major version?)

Paul
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