[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Steve Dower]

On 23Feb2017 0914, Donald Stufft wrote:
>
>> On Feb 23, 2017, at 11:04 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com
>> <mailto:ncoghlan at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Redistributors may *ask* a publisher to reclassify their project as a
>> library or a devtool (and hence also avoid pinning their dependencies
>> in order to make integration easier), but publishers will always have
>> the option of saying "No, we want to you to treat it as an
>> application, and we won't help your end users if we know you're
>> overriding our pinned dependencies and the issue can't be reproduced
>> outside your custom configuration".
>
>
> This whole discussion feels like trying to overcomplicate something
> that’s already not a simple to solve a problem that I don’t think is
> really that widespread. My estimation is that 99% of people who are
> currently using ``==`` will just immediately switch over to using
> whatever flag we provide that allows them to still do that. Adding a “do
> the thing I asked for” detritus to the project seems like a bad idea.
>
> It’s not really any different than if a project say, only released
> Wheels. While we want to encourage projects to release sdists (and to
> not ping versions) trying to enforce that isn’t worth the cost. Like
> most packaging issues, I think that it’s best solved by opening up
> issues on the offending project’s issue tracker.

+1. This has been my feeling the entire time I spent catching up on the 
thread just now.

As soon as "user education" becomes a requirement, we may as well do the 
simplest and least restrictive metadata possible and use the education 
to help people understand the impact of their decisions.

Cheers,
Steve