distutils.util.rfc822_escape strips each line of its whitespace before indenting, but this can mean losing meaningful whitespace, such as in reStructuredText. distutils uses rfc822_escape to escape fields in metadata, such as PKG-INFO. This unfortunately means that you cant use reStructuredText formatting in your long description (suggested in PEP345), or are limited to a set that doesn't require indentation (no block quotes, etc.). for example: >>> rest = """ ... a literal python block:: ... >>> import this ... """ >>> print distutils.util.rfc822_escape(rest) a literal python block:: >>> import this I would be expecting this to look something like: a literal python block:: >>> import this It looks like this behavior was intentionally added in rev 20099, but that was about 7 years ago - before reStructuredText and eggs. I wonder if it makes sense to re-think that implementation with this sort of metadata in mind, assuming this behavior isn't required to be rfc822 compliant. I think it would certainly be a shame to miss out on a good thing like proper (renderable) reST in our metadata. Is distutils being over-cautious in flattening out all whitespace? A w3c discussion on multiple lines in rfc822 [1] seems to suggest that whitespace can be 'unfolded' safely, so it seems a shame to be throwing it away when it can have important meaning. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/3_Lexical.html
Here's that keeps the whitespace in tact, along with a simple test. This doesn't patch docs as the existing documentation_ already describes the long string as multiple lines of "plain text in reStructuredText format", which is what this fixes. .. _documentation: http://docs.python.org/dev/distutils/setupscript.html#additional-meta-data
I've just checked that the patch still applies cleanly to 2.6 and it does and the tests still passes. It looks like the patch has already been applied to 3.0 but without the test. The test part of the part applies cleanly to 3.0 too.
Notice that we are also losing something else that can mean a lot in reST : empty lines. They also need to be escaped. But we can't do it properly unless we encode empty lines with something else than a 8 space line because when rfc822.Message reads it, it removes it.
I will treat the empty line problem in another issue because I won't apply it in 2.6/3.1. This one is fixed in r76684, r76685, r76686, r76687. Thanks !
