[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Eric Smith<eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> 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!

Yes, so Ian Bicking was, and Jim Fulton, and we worked from there on
Distutils-SIG.

To answer to Paul's question on my motivations for PEP 376, Phillip
gave the answers
I was going to give.

But as Eric says, that was one topic out of others.

>
> 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.

Yes please do so, and have a look at Tres and Matthias notes from the summit

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/StaticMetadata

but that's another topic, that will deserve a PEP on its own

Tarek