[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:10 AM, Vinay Sajip via Distutils-SIG
<distutils-sig at python.org> wrote:
>> humpty in term uses uses distlib which seems to mishandle wheel
>> metadata. (For example, it chokes if there's extra distribution meta and
>> makes it impossible for buildout to install python-dateutil from a wheel.)
>
> I looked into the "mishandling". It's that the other tools don't adhere to
> [the current state of] PEP 426 as closely as distlib does. For example,
> wheel writes JSON metadata to metadata.json in the .dist-info directory,
> whereas PEP 426 calls for that data to be in pydist.json. The non-JSON
> metadata in the wheel (the METADATA file) does not strictly adhere to any of
> the metadata PEPs 241, 314, 345 or 426 (it has a mixture of incompatible
> fields).
>
> I can change distlib to look for metadata.json, and relax the rules to be
> more liberal regarding which fields to accept, but adhering to the PEP isn't
> mishandling things, as I see it.

I thought the current status was that it's called metadata.json
exactly *because* it's not standardized, and you *shouldn't* look at
it?

It's too bad that the JSON thing didn't work out, but I think we're
better off working on better specifying the one source of truth
everything already uses (METADATA) instead of bringing in *new*
partially-incompatible-and-poorly-specified formats.

-n

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