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

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Tue Feb 19 23:10:17 CET 2013

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 (/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 pkgresources) 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 bdistwininst 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 ?

I am confident distlib can thrive outside of the standard library! Why the rush to kill it before its prime?

Who's trying to kill distlib ?

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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