[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé tarek at ziade.org
Fri Jun 22 09:24:59 CEST 2012

On 6/22/12 9:11 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

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.

I still think this is an implementation detail, and that ini can work here, as they have proven to work with buildout and look very clean to me.

But I guess that's not important -- looking forward for you changes proposals on packaging.

I am now wondering why we don't have a yaml module in the stdlib btw :)

Cheers, Nick.

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