[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426 and 459

Daniel Holth dholth at gmail.com
Tue Apr 8 05:15:11 CEST 2014


I read through the latest versions of PEP 426 and 459 "Metadata 2.0
and extensions". Here are my comments.

The PEP suggests "setup.py dist_info" is a thing. Only "setup.py
egg_info" works. It might make sense to refactor bdist_wheel to
include a dist_info command, but if done badly it would break
distributions that rely on the pluggable nature of .egg-info
generation (most every part of the egg-info directory is written by a
separate plugin).

Why do we care about "Source labels MUST be unique within each project
and MUST NOT match any defined version for the project."?

I still think meta distributions are unnecessary and hard to
understand. It's either a lot of trouble to try to discourage ==
dependencies while still allowing them sometimes, or an
overcomplicated way to try to define requirements.txt 2.0 by allowing
distributions that aren't exactly distributions.

This sounds like a pain:
" To avoid malicious hijacking of names, when interpreting metadata retrieved
 from a public index server, automated tools MUST NOT pay any attention to
 ``"provides"`` entries that do not correspond to a published distribution. "

I'm not convinced that console scripts should not continue to be a
specially named entry point / export rather than their own very
similar thing.

Overall both peps are quite good. We need to be able to put them to
use to advance our goal of providing a transparently
backwards-compatible Python packaging system.

My peps repository on bitbucket has an updated json schema.


More information about the Distutils-SIG mailing list