[Python-Dev] Edits to Metadata 1.2 to add extras (optional dependencies) (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald.stufft at gmail.com
Tue Aug 28 15:19:33 CEST 2012

On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Agreed, and this is the kind of thing a v1.3 metadata PEP could define. It just needs to be properly namespaced, and the obvious namespacing mechanism is PyPI project names.

The biggest reason I have against namespacing them is it makes moving from experimental to standard easier, but I'm ok with some form of a namespace. The biggest reason I see against using PyPI names as the namespace is it needlessly ties a piece of data to the original creator. Similar to how right now you could write a less hacky setuptools, but in order to do so you need to continue to use the setuptools package name (see distribute). Using PyPI names means that in the requires-dist example it would be something like setuptools-requires-dist, and even if I make my own tool that supports the same concept as setuptools's requires-dist I would need to use setuptools-requires-dist.

The concept of metadata I think should be divorced from specific implementations. Obviously there are going to be some implementation specific issues but I think it's much cleaner to have a x-requires-dist that any implementation can use than to have whoever-invented-it-first-requires-dist or a twenty-different-forms-of-requires-dist.

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