[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Nick Coghlan]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Tarek Ziadé <tarek at ziade.org> wrote:
> On 6/22/12 7:05 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> I don't understand what's the problem is with ini-style files, as they are
> suitable for multi-line variables etc. (see zc.buildout)
>
> yaml vs ini vs xxx seems to be an implementation detail, and my take on this
> is that we have ConfigParser in the stdlib

You can't do more than one layer of nested data structures cleanly
with an ini-style solution, and some aspects of packaging are just
crying out for metadata that nests more deeply than that. The
setup.cfg format for specifying installation layouts doesn't even come
*close* to being intuitively readable - using a format with better
nesting support has some hope of fixing that, since filesystem layouts
are naturally hierarchical.

A JSON based format would also be acceptable to me from a functional
point of view, although in that case, asking people to edit it
directly would be cruel - you would want to transform it to YAML in
order to actually read it or write it.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia