[Distutils] [proposal] version-free + lookup-friendly dist-info location

[Paul Moore]

On 17 March 2017 at 09:58, Ronny Pfannschmidt
<opensource at ronnypfannschmidt.de> wrote:
> while looking over the recent peps i noticed that we keep a few inherent
> inefficiencies in where to find dist-info folders
>
> because they include version numbers, to get a distribution we have to
> search for it
> which is no longer really sensible as we no longer have multi-version
> installation in any upcoming standard.
>
> in order to address that i'd like to propose to switch
>
> from "{distribution}-{version}.dist-info/" to "{distribution}.dist-info/"
>
> given that it has been used since quite a while i would prefer a quick
> feedback loop from the ML before thinking about writing a PEP.

+1 from me. And maybe explicitly state that installing multiple
versions of a distribution is not supported. Although this opens a
somewhat larger can of worms, in that you can install different
versions in separate directories - say in system and user
site-packages - and that has subtle issues but is technically not
rejected at the moment. So maybe restrict it to stating that
installing multiple versions of a distribution *in the same directory*
is not supported and duck the bigger issue for now.

Paul