[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Eric Smith]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 2009/7/8 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
>> If it were being driven by setuptools, I'd have just implemented it myself
>> and presented it as a fait accompli.  I can't speak to Tarek's motives, but
>> I assume that, as stated in the PEP, the primary driver is supporting the
>> distutils being able to uninstall things, and secondarily to allow other
>> tools to be built on top of the API.
> 
> My understanding is that all of the various distutils PEPs were driven
> by the "packaging summit" ay PyCon. The struggle here seems to be to
> find *anyone* from that summit who will now comment on the discussion
> :-(

I was there, and I've been commenting!

There might have been more discussion after the language summit and the 
one open space event I went to. But the focus as I recall was static 
metadata and version specification. When I originally brought up static 
metadata at the summit, I meant metadata describing the sources in the 
distribution, so that we can get rid of setup.py's. From that metadata, 
I want to be able to generate .debs, .rpms, .eggs, etc.

But I think we've veered into metadata that describes what has been 
installed. I don't think that's so useful. As I've said, this is private 
to the installers. If 2 installers want to communicate with each other 
about what they've installed, then they can agree on that data. I just 
don't find it generally useful for all installers, and therefore not 
useful for distutils.

I'd like to get back to the metadata that describes the source files. 
That's where the real value lies, in my opinion. I'll try and work on a 
post to distutils-sig explaining my thinking.