[Distutils] Meeting info re: sdists

[Nick Coghlan]

On 14 October 2015 at 12:40, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On 14 October 2015 at 15:04, Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Oct 13, 2015 7:50 PM, "Robert Collins" <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
>
>> * egg-info and dist-info should generate JSONLD
>
> The .egg-info and .dist-info directories are existing defined formats,
> I don't see any way that they can be retroactively defined as being
> JSONLD. I understand you have a JSONLD spec being discussed - this
> would be a successor to PEP-426, and Nick has put the breaks on all
> such things until we *catch up* with the already designed and defined
> work - so I'm not sure where your spec fits in things: but even
> assuming its all approved, we still can't change the meaning of
> existing in the wild artifacts.

I finally found time to investigate JSON-LD a while back, and I think
there's potentially value in having the formal specification of our
metadata formats be in the form of a JSON-LD context definition:
https://github.com/pypa/interoperability-peps/issues/31

However, doing that doesn't actually solve any immediate problems for
us, as none of our tools are JSON-LD aware, they're all based on ad
hoc JSON processing. Thus it's firmly in the "might be nice to do"
category for me, rather than "we need to do this as an urgent
priority".

One thing we do need to be careful of is the fact that PEP 426 is
still a draft spec - if there are things we want to formalise *now* in
a JSON format aimed at the *current* capabilities of the ecosystem, we
may want to push some of the ideas like metadata extensions and the
finer granularity of dependencies out to a more speculative metadata
3.0 spec, and descope 2.0 to a "only incremental additions to current
capabilities, wrapped up in a better defined format" effort.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia