[Python-Dev] Fwd: PEP 426 is now the draft spec for distribution metadata 2.0

[Daniel Holth]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 5:10 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

> On 19.02.2013 23:01, Daniel Holth wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:34 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 19.02.2013 14:40, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 11:23 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> * PEP 426 doesn't include any mention of the egg distribution format,
> >>>>   even though it's the most popular distribution format at the moment.
> >>>>   It should at least include the location of the metadata file
> >>>>   in eggs (EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO) and egg installations
> >>>>   (<eggdir>/EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO).
> >>>
> >>> "Other tools involved in Python distribution may also use this format."
> >>>
> >>> The egg format has never been, and never will be, officially endorsed
> >>> by python-dev. The wheel format is the standard format for binary
> >>> distribution, and PEP 376 defines the standard location for metadata
> >>> on installed distributions.
> >>
> >> Oh, come on, Nick, that's just silly. setuptools was included in stdlib
> >> for a short while, so the above is simply wrong. Eggs are the most
> >> widely used binary distribution format for Python package on PyPI:
> >>
> >> # wc *files.csv
> >>   25585   25598 1431013 2013-02-19-egg-files.csv
> >>    4619    4640  236694 2013-02-19-exe-files.csv
> >>     254     255   13402 2013-02-19-msi-files.csv
> >>  104691  104853 5251962 2013-02-19-tar-gz-files.csv
> >>      24      24    1221 2013-02-19-whl-files.csv
> >>   17937   18022  905913 2013-02-19-zip-files.csv
> >>  153110  153392 7840205 total
> >>
> >> (based on todays PyPI stats)
> >>
> >> It doesn't really help ignoring realities... and I'm saying
> >> that as one of the core devs who got setuptools kicked out of
> >> the stdlib again.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> >> eGenix.com
> >>
> >
> > The wheel philosophy is that it should be supported by both python-dev
> and
> > setuptools and that you should feel happy about using setuptools if you
> > like it whether or not python-dev (currently) endorses that. If you are
> > using setuptools (distribute's pkg_resources) then you can use both at
> the
> > same time.
> >
> > Distribute, distutils and setuptools' problems have not been well
> > understood which I think is why there has been a need to discredit
> > setuptools by calling it non-standard. It is the defacto standard. If
> your
> > packages have dependencies there is no other choice. Wheel tries to solve
> > the real problem by allowing you to build a package with setuptools while
> > giving the end-user the choice of installing setuptools or not.
> >
> > Of course eggs are the most popular right now. The wheel format is very
> > egg-like while avoiding some of egg's problems. See the comparison in the
> > PEP or read the story on wheel's rtfd. The wheel project includes tools
> to
> > losslessly convert eggs or bdist_wininst to wheel.
>
> That's all fine, but it doesn't explain the refusal to add the
> documentation of the location of the PKG-INFO file in eggs ?


It would just be a sentence, I wouldn't have a problem with it but I also
don't see why it would be necessary. Even setuptools doesn't touch the file
usually. Right now distribute's pkg_resources currently only understands
Requires-Dist if it is inside a .dist-info directory.

Sorry, Chris must have meant http://hg.python.org/distlib/ . I was
struggling to imagine a world where that is more visible than something on
bitbucket. Half the comments have been about putting something in stdlib
right away, something that I do not understand at all as a voracious PyPI
or https://crate.io/ user.

You should secure both the metadata and the packages but it doesn't have
anything to do with the serialization format.

Wheel is designed so that the metadata is at the end of the .zip and can be
retrieved with an HTTP partial request. The feature may or may not be
useful.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20130219/d6a3b986/attachment.html>