[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Paul Moore]

On 23 February 2017 at 14:49, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 02:28 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
>> I'd also drop "used to develop and deploy Python libraries,
>> applications, and scripts" - why does what it's used for affect its
>> category?
>
> Things for working on & with Python code often have installation
> requirements a bit different from other applications. E.g. pip installs
> (or used to) with aliases specific to the Python version it runs on, so
> pip, pip3 and pip-3.5 could all point to the same command. Clearly it
> wouldn't make sense to do that for youtube-dl.
>
> I'm not sure about 'tool' as a name for this category, but they often do
> require different handling to general applications.

Point taken, but in the absence of a behavioural difference, why not
let the author decide?

If I wrote "grep in Python", I'd call it a tool, not an application.
The author of pyline (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyline) describes
it as a "tool". For me, command line utilities are typically called
tools. Applications tend to have (G)UIs. I don't think we should
repurpose existing terms. And unless we're planning on enforcing
different behaviour, I don't think we need to try to dictate at all.

If we were to add a facility to create versioned names (rather than
just having a special-case hack for pip) then I could imagine
restricting it to certain package types - although I can't imagine why
we would bother doing so - but let's not worry about that until it
happens.

Or maybe we'd want to insist that pip only allow build tools to have a
certain package type (setuptools, flit, ...) but again, why bother?
What's the gain?

Paul