[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Erik Bray]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 4:08 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think PKG-INFO is a highly human-editable format.
>
> That doesn't mean you necessarily want to edit it yourself; notably,
> there will likely be some redundancy between the description in the
> file and other files like the README.
>
> Also, today one of the key use cases people have for custom code in
> setup.py is to pull the package version from a __version__ attribute
> in a module.  (Which is evil, of course, but people do it anyway.)
>
> But it might be worth adding a setuptools feature to pull metadata
> from PKG-INFO (or DIST-INFO) instead of generating a new one, to see
> what people think of using PKG-INFO first, other files second.  In
> principle, one could reduce a setup.py to just "from setuptools import
> setup_distinfo; setup_distinfo()" or some such.

In other words, using d2to1 and only for `setup.py egg_info` (only not
egg_info but whatever we're doing instead to generate the metadata ;)

Erik