[Distutils] moving things forward (was: wheel including files it shouldn't)

[Chris Barker]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:09 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:


> I know I'm one of the folks that has historically been dubious of the
> "just use setup.cfg" idea, due to the assorted problems with the
> ini-style format not extending particularly well to tree-structured
> data (beyond the single level of file sections).
>

me too :-)


> 1. We've repeatedly run up against the "JSON is good for programs

talking to each other, but lousy as a human-facing interface" problem
>

yeah, JSON is annoying that way -- but not much worse than INI -- except
for lack of comments.

(side note, I'd really like it if the json module would accept "JSON
extended with comments" as an option...)



> 3. The ongoing popularity of setup.cfg shows that while ini-style may
> not be perfect for this use case, it clearly makes it over the
> threshold of "good enough"
>

it's only popular because it's what's there -- if we're using that
standard, we could make the same argument about setuptools ;-)



> So when I ask myself now "What's the *simplest* thing we could do that
> will make things better than the status quo?", then the answer I come
> up with today is your original idea: bless setup.cfg (or at least a
> subset of it) as a standardised interface.
>

IIUC, we would be changin, or at least adding to the current setup.dfg
spec. So this is a change, no matter how you slice it, saying
"configuration will be specified in setup.something, in some other format,
is the least significant part of all this change.

And maybe it's good to keep "new style" configuration clearly separate.

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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