[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Vinay Sajip]

> 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?


Well, it was work-in-progress-standardised according to PEP 426 (since
sometimes implementations have to work in parallel with working out the
details of specifications). Given that PEP 426 wasn't done and dusted
but being progressed, I would have thought it perfectly acceptable to
use "pydist.json", as the only things that would be affected would be
packaging tools working to the PEP.

> 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.

When you say "everything already uses", do you mean setuptools and wheel?
If nobody else is allowed to play, that's one thing. But otherwise, there
need to be standards for interoperability. The METADATA file, now - exactly
which standard does it follow? The one in the dateutil wheel that Jim
referred to doesn't appear to conform to any of the metadata PEPs. It was
rejected by old metadata code in distlib (which came of out the Python 3.3
era "packaging" package - not to be confused with Donald's of the same name -
which is strict in its interpretation of those earlier PEPs).

The METADATA format (key-value) is not really flexible enough for certain
things which were in PEP 426 (e.g. dependency descriptions), and for these
JSON seems a reasonable fit. There's no technical reason why "the JSON thing
didn't work out", as far as I can see - it was just given up on for a more
incremental approach (which has got no new PEPs other than 440, AFAICT). I
understand that social reasons are often more important than technical reasons
when it comes to success or failure of an approach; I'm just not sure that
in this case, it wasn't given up on too early.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip