[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Donald Stufft]

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Alex Clark wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 6/21/12 5:38 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > End users should not need packaging tools on their machines.
> > 
> > Sort of riffing on this idea, I cannot seem to find a specification for
> > what a Python
> > package actually is.
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> FWIW according to distutils[1], a package is: a module or modules inside 
> another module[2]. So e.g.::
> 
> 
> foo.py is a module
> 
> 
> and:
> 
> foo/__init__.py
> foo/foo.py
> 
> is a simple package containing the following modules:
> 
> import foo, foo.foo
> 
> 
> Alex
> 
> 
> [1] 
> http://docs.python.org/distutils/introduction.html#general-python-terminology
> 
> [2] And a distribution is a compressed archive of a package, in case 
> that's not clear.
> 
Right, i'm actually talking about distributions. (As is everyone else in this thread).
And that a definition is not a specification.

What i'm trying to get at is with a standard package format where all the metadata is
able to get gotten at without the packaging lib (distutils/setuptools cannot get at
metadata without using distutils or setuptools). It would need to be required that
this serves as the one true source of metadata and that other tools can add certain
types of metadata to this format.

If say distutils2 wrote a package that adhered to a certain standard, and wrote all the
information that distutils2 knows about how to install said package (what files, names,
versions, dependencies etc) to a file (say PKG-INFO) that contained only "common"
standard information then another tool (say bento) could take that package, and install
it.

The idea i'm hoping for is to stop worrying about one implementation over another and
hoping to create a common format that all the tools can agree upon and create/install.

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