[Distutils] Metadata 2.0: Is there a formal spec for a requirement?

[Vinay Sajip]

From: Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io>


> Technically that was a PEP 426 change.

Yes, and I haven't yet changed distlib to remove support for the older "foo (>=X.Y)" form in the earlier version of the PEP.


> Yea, my “problem” with distlib was always that I think Vinay and I wanted two different things from it. I wanted a
> reference implementation that only came with the PEP standardized pieces, vinay wanted a library that implemented
> things he could use for distitil.

Not quite - it's the other way around: distil is mainly a test bed for distlib, to verify that the latter's functionality is usable in practice. What I want is a rather more modern packaging system than we presently have - for example having to download archives in order to determine dependencies is, shall we say, sub-optimal. I want to move away from setup.py, towards declarative metadata, while offering a migration path (which 3.3 packaging didn't). While they're not perfect, distlib/distil allow me to install stuff without executing setup.py on target systems a lot of the time, and ISTM that's moving things in the right direction.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip