[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Paul Moore]

On 17 February 2017 at 08:56, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> - we retain full control over the tone of the error notification

I tried to formulate a long response to this email, and got completely
bogged down. So I'm going to give a brief[1] response for now and duck
out until the dust settles.

By "we" above, I assume you mean distutils-sig/PyPA. As part of that
group, I find the complexities of how distributions package stuff up,
and the expected interactions of the multitude of parties involved in
the model you describe, completely baffling. That's fine normally (as
a Windows developer, I don't typically interact with Linux
distributions) but when it comes to being part of distutils-sig/PyPA
in terms of how we present things like this, I feel a responsibility
to understand (and by proxy, represent users who are similarly unaware
of distro practices, etc).

I understand (somewhat) the motivations behind this distinction
between "requires" and "integrates"[2] but I think we need to come up
with a much more straightforward explanation - geared towards library
authors who don't understand (and probably aren't that interested in)
the underling issues - before we standardise anything. Because
otherwise, we'll be rehashing this debate over and over as library
authors get errors they don't understand, and come asking.

Paul

[1] Yes, this was as brief as I could manage :-(
[2] As a data point, I couldn't even think of the right terms to use
here without scanning back over the email thread to look for them.
That indicates to me that the concepts are anything but intuitive :-(