[Python-Dev] packaging location ?

[Nick Coghlan]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 5:05 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I agree with Lennart's and Antoine's advice of just move forward with what
>> we have. If some PEPs need fixing then let's fix them, but we don't need to
>> rock the horse even more by going overboard. Getting the sane, core bits
>> into the stdlib as packaging is meant to is plenty to take on. If people
>> want to reinvent stuff they can do it elsewhere. I personally don't care if
>> it is done inside or outside the stdlib initially or if it stays in
>> packaging or goes directly into distutils, but forward movement with what we
>> have is the most important thing.
>
> +100
>
> I was excited about packaging in 2010, it is time to document and
> implement the specs we have. The sooner we do, the less confusing it
> will be for a newcomer who just wants to release a simple printer of
> nested lists to pypi.

I've been chatting to Chris McDonough a bit as well, and one
potentially useful thing would be to clearly document the
setuptools/distribute metadata precisely as it is generated today.
Currently these formats are entirely implicit in the implementation of
the code that reads and writes them, as far as I can tell anyway. The
distribute docs seem to do a decent job of explaining setup.py and the
various setuptools specific arguments, but *not* what the file formats
will look like inside the metadata directory when installed.

The main advantages of this would be to make it clear:
1. What can setuptools metadata describe, that v1.2 of the official
metadata standard cannot?
2. Does v1.3 allow everything that setuptools can currently describe
(either directly, or as an extension)?
3. Does v1.3 allow some things to be expressed more clearly than they
can be with setuptools?

Cheers,
Nick.

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