[Catalog-sig] [Python-Dev] egg_info in PyPI

["Martin v. Löwis"]

>> I think you are misunderstanding. The infrastructure will *not* depend
>> on the old formats. Instead, packaging that have that information will
>> provide it, packages that don't will not. The infrastructure is entirely
>> agnostic on whether the data is available or not. In particular, it will
>> not try to interpret the data in any way.
>>
> No, not at all. If tools *use* the information (and if they don't then
> what is the point?) then packages that want to be compatible with those
> tools will have to provide this information.

Not true. Tools could/should also support PEP 345 data, and then they 
can support either kind of package.

> By providing information in this format PyPI will (like it or not) be
> blessing this format as the 'standard' way of providing this
> information.

By that definition, *both* formats are "blessed". The PEP 345 data
is already blessed. Depending on the definition of "providing", the 
egg-info data are also already "provided", ever since PyPI started
accepting egg files.

>> I don't think this can well happen. In most known use cases, the tools
>> could support both forms of metadata.
> Well, a) I would like to see that demonstrated

The tool in question is tl.eggdepend. It can easily support both kinds
of metadata.

> and b) having one
> standard is *far* preferable and having the distutils2 format be that
> standard is also far preferable. Please wait a bit (or start on
> supporting the distutils2 metadata format now).

The latter is already the case: the distutils2 metadata *is* supported
*now*. It's just that no package is using it (except for pep345demo).

As for a bit: how long exactly?

>> That's really sad. So people will have to wait a few years to
>> efficiently implement tools that they could implement today.
>
> Why a few years?

Because it will take that long until a significant number of
packages will use distutils 2. People still use very old versions
of packaging tools (e.g. the ones that come with Debian); it will
just take time to get the new tools and API adopted.

Regards,
Martin