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

[Donald Stufft]

On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 10:43 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>  
> I'm happy for PyPI to host such a registry. A specificaion for the  
> registry should be part of the PEP for the 1.3 format, but I would  
> propose this structure (without having researched in detail what
> other registries feature, but with a rough idea what IANA registries
> typically include):

PyPI packages itself could serve as a registry, but I like the idea of
a separate registry better in many ways because it lets you divorce
the namespace from the package. The question being would this
be a x-registered-name type system or a registered-namespace-*
type system?

It occurs to me one problem with arbitrary namespaces is there
is a unintended collision problem. e.g. you have the foo-bar namespace
and the foo namespace, what happens if you have a test key inside of
foo-bar and a bar-test inside of the foo namepspace. They'll both end
up being foo-bar-test. This makes me think that we need a seperate
registry and that if we go the namespace route it should be limited to
alphanumerics only so that you don't have the foo/foo-bar collision problem.
>  
> - name of metadata field
> - name of registrant (individual or PyPI package)
> - contact email address (published)
> - expiration date; by default, extensions expire 1 month after
> their registration, unless renewed; maximum expiration time is
> 5 years
> - English description of the field
> - regular expression to validate the field

What happens when it expires? Is that name freed up for future use? I
think that freeing up the name is likely to be a bad idea since we can't go
backwards in time (as you alluded to later about not deleting them), so
what does expiration do?  
>  
> Deleting undesired extensions would not be possible, instead, one
> would have to create another extension if the syntax or semantics
> changes


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