[Distutils] Removing the aspirational aspects of PEP 426

[Robert Collins]

On 28 October 2015 at 23:39, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2015 3:25 AM, "Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
> [...]
>> From an sdist metadata perspective, though, I think the right thing to do
>> is to descope PEP 426 to just the stuff we *need* for the build system
>> improvements, and defer everything else (e.g. JSON-LD, SPDX, richer
>> dependency semantics, etc) to a future metadata 3.0 proposal (or potentially
>> metadata extensions, or 2.x format updates).
>
> I think PEP 426 is actually orthogonal to these proposals. AFAICT, the only
> reason Robert's PEP as written requires PEP 426 is that he needs a standard
> serializable format to list dependencies... but he actually defines such a
> format about 10 lines above for the static bootstrap-requirements key, i.e.
> a list of specifier strings. So it actually makes more sense to use that for
> dynamic requirements too for internal consistency, and leave PEP 426 out of
> it.

pip requires:
 - distribution name
 - install_requires [+extras]

today. It will want external dependencies in future (and in the spec I
put forward build dependencies would be obtained earlier so could be
skipped).

I'd rather not invent a *new* format for handling both of these, but
i'm ok if Donald and Nick specifically are.

-Rob
-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud