[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 8:18 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> We need approximately five fields:
>>
>> Name
>> Version
>> Provides-Extra
>> Requires-Dist
>> Setup-Requires-Dist
>>
>> the rest are useless, never need to be parsed by anyone, or are
>> already sent to pypi as a dict.
>>
>> We need the environment markers language.
>>
>> We need the requirements specifiers >= 4.0.0, < 9.
>>
>
> You're taking a disappointingly narrow view of the metadata, it seems to me. If
> you look at the totality of metadata which describes distributions in the here-
> and-now world of setuptools, it's a lot more than that - just look at any of
> my metadata files which I've pointed to in the "distil" documentation.
>
> You're only talking about *installation* metadata, but even there your coverage
> is incomplete. I won't go into any more details now, but suffice to say that as
> I am working on "distil", I am coming across decisions about installation which
> either I hard-code into distil (thus making it quite likely that another tool
> will give different results), or enshrine in installation metadata (constraining
> all compliant tools to adhere to the developer's and/or user's wishes in that
> area).

Hooray for JSON.

I actually liked the separation and viewed it as a de-coupling
feature, but that will probably be less important as we avoid setup.py
generating different metadata for each execution.