[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 1:36 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> WRT to “standard implementations” versus “standards”, the idea of a
> “standard implementation” being the source of truth and no longer needing to
> do all the work to define standards is a nice idea, but I think it is an
> idea that is never actually going to work out as well as real
> standardization. There is *always* going to be a need for tools that aren’t
> the blessed tools to interact with these items. Even if you can
> authoritatively say that this one Python implementation is the only
> implementation that any Python program will ever need, there is still the
> problem that people need to consume this information in languages that
> aren’t Python.

Another even more fundamental reason that standards are important is
to document semantics. Like, distlib or packaging or whatever can
expose the "provides" field, but what does that actually mean? As a
user of distlib/packaging, how should I change what I'm doing when I
see that field? As a package author when should I set it? (I'm
intentionally picking an example where the answer is "well the PEP
says something about this but in reality it was never implemented and
maybe has some security issues and no-one really knows" :-).) A
"standard implementation" can abstract away some things, but by
definition these are mostly the boring bits...

-n

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