[Python-Dev] Edits to Metadata 1.2 to add extras (optional dependencies)

[Daniel Holth]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 9:09 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> How about
>>
>> Extensions are fields that start with a pypi-registered name followed
>> by a hyphen. A file that contains extension fields declares them with
>> Extension: name :
>>
>> Extension: pypiname
>> pypiname-Field: value
>
> The repetition seems rather annoying. Compare the two section based
> variants I just posted to:
>
>     Extension: wheel
>     wheel-Version: 0.9
>     wheel-Packager: bdist_wheel-0.1
>     wheel-Root-Is-Purelib: true
>
> It does have the advantage that tools for manipulating the format can
> remain dumber, but that doesn't seem like *that* much of an advantage,
> especially since any such benefit could be eliminated completely by
> just switching to a completely standard ConfigParser format by putting
> the PEP defined settings into a [python] section.

Wheel is a little different because once it's installed it is no
longer a wheel, but it makes a decent example. That's not even
repetition, it's just longer tag names. Repetition is having one
Classifier: line for every trove classifier.

It would be quite inconvenient to change the parser for PKG-INFO. It's
a win to keep the file flat.