[Distutils] Draft PEP for JSON based metadata published

[Nick Coghlan]

On 30 May 2013 01:23, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> I feel like we are still conflating some names and use cases here with
> source_label, source_url, source reference, and the is operator.
>
> source_label // source_url - References to the source that is associated
> with this release. Must not point to anything besides source (no whls,
> no other built or platform specific artifact).
>
> is // source reference - This is where my real issue comes into play.
>
> I almost think that it doesn't make any sense to allow an is comparison
> to a source label. In Python `is` is an identity function and a source
> label is not a directly installable thing. It must be built first (even
> if building involves simply copying .py files into a whl).
>
> I don't like using the word "source" here because when pointing at an
> url it could be a whl file, it could be an egg, it could be a source
> archive.
>
> I'm not sure what should be done about the non url form of ``is``. The
> url form makes sense to me because an url is (theortically) an identity
> pointer to an exact installable. However a source_label is not, it could
> have any number of installable files associated with it and the one you
> install may be dependent upon what OS you're using or what Python
> version your using.

The whole of the metadata operates at the source identification level -
it's up to the installation tools to work out how best to satisfy that
given the installation context.

I only allowed build URLs at all because it seemed silly to force
installation tools to come up with a distinct format for them. However, if
allowing both appears to be too confusing, that's the half that will go
away, leaving it up to the integration tools to say how to nominate
particular binaries.

Source references themselves are in danger of going away entirely as being
not worth the hassle.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> --
>   Donald Stufft
>   donald at stufft.io
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