[Distutils] PEP 516 and pypa.json

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:06 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I saw PEP-0516 go through check-ins, and had a question about the pypa.json
> portion of the proposal -- namely, why are we using a .json file?
>
> I presume this is a file that will be created by hand, and while json is not
> as ugly as xml, it's certainly not pretty.
>
> Can we not use an .ini file, or a white-space significant format?  The
> latter should be familiar, if not comfortable, to any Python programmer.

These are still draft proposals, and the actual file format is the
least interesting question to discuss. Think of the JSON thing as
being a placeholder for now :-).

There is no obvious solution, because .ini files are extremely
underspecified, nothing else is in the stdlib, yaml contains its own
share of gibbering horrors, toml is not widely used and is associated
with an extremely divisive figure, etc. etc. Don't worry, though:
there will be bikeshedding. Ideally *after* the more substantive
issues are settled :-)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org