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

[Paul Moore]

On 23 June 2013 13:53, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think I'll just move the summary back up into the core metadata. You
> can't make a sane index server without it, and it used to be mandatory, so
> "maybe mandatory, maybe not" just makes things more complicated than they
> need to be rather than simplifying anything.
>
Yes, it's the "maybe mandatory, depending on your tools" state that's
annoying. If summary was the only one of them, then this change makes
sense. Thanks.

Older metadata versions made things like Download-URL mandatory, which was
a pain for internal projects that didn't actually *have* a download URL,
just a file on the software server or something (and no, file URLs don't
count :-)) I guess they all become optional under Metadata 2.0 (as per the
"Changes from Previous Versions" appendix).


> I expect tools to come into line with PEP 426 on that front over time.
> Those that still generate legacy metadata will likely follow the legacy
> requirements, and for tools with stronger opinions about what should be
> provided, it will be up to the authors to document that properly.
>

OK, that's cool. As tools move towards *validating* to the 2.0 spec, the
problem goes away. It's just that there's no way to make older tools
validate to the new spec, so there's a transition here which we have to
live with (as opposed to *generating* metadata 2.0, which can be handled by
converters).

> Contributions to the Python packaging user guide (a shared introduction to
> setuptools and pip) are also more than welcome (see
> http://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org). Marcus has made a
> good start based on the distribute guide (with less opinionated hyperbole),
> and I expect it to settle down to something quite usable once pip 1.4 is
> released and it can simply direct people towards setuptools 0.7+ as the
> default build tool (plus "wheel" for bdist_wheel support) and pip 1.4+ as
> the default installer (including support for installation from wheels, and
> automatic use of cached local builds for installation from source).
>

Yes, I should have a look at that.


> We really don't want end users needing to read PEPs just to get started.
>

Agreed, but again there's not much else to work with at the moment :-)
Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130623/413559fd/attachment-0001.html>