[Distutils] PEP 566 - metadata 1.3 changes

Thomas Kluyver thomas at kluyver.me.uk
Wed Jan 10 08:44:36 EST 2018


I hope everyone has had a good break. :-)

I'd like to see PEP 566 move forwards. From the last thread, I think people were mostly happy with it as stands, but there were some proposals to introduce further metadata changes. I'd suggest that we finalise the PEP as it currently stands, and save up other changes for a future metadata revision.

One change I would like to the current text is to make  more explicit that the format of several fields allowing version specifiers (Requires-Dist, Provides-Dist, Obsoletes-Dist, Requires-External) has changed, as PEP 508 removes the need for parentheses around the version specifier.

The section on version specifiers currently refers to PEP 440, which doesn't mention the parentheses at all, and says they are otherwise unchanged from PEP 345, which says parentheses are required. I would like to add some text to that section, such as:

"Following PEP 508, version specifiers no longer need to be surrounded by parentheses in the fields Requires-Dist, Provides-Dist, Obsoletes-Dist or Requires-External, so e.g. `requests >= 2.8.1` is now a valid value. The recommended format is without parentheses, but tools parsing metadata should also be able to handle version specifiers in parentheses."

Thanks,
Thomas



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