[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/8 Eric Smith <eric at trueblade.com>:
> I was there, and I've been commenting!

Sorry, I hadn't realised that. Thanks for the correction.

> 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.

OK, that helps a lot. I see how your postings fit into things a little
better now.

Paul.